Next.js Engineering Lead (Hands-On, Open Source)

Vercel Inc.; San Francisco (CA); On-site; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation package

Equity

Inclusive healthcare package

Learning & growth support

Flexible time off

Work-from-home budget

Job summary

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to build and direct a team working on Next.js. This hands-on player/coach role requires you to stay close to code while guiding a small team to do its best work.

You will be an engineer first, and a manager second, contributing to core framework areas, reviewing code, and providing practical coaching. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, performance, and a strong technical vision.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience and hands-on proficiency.
• Led engineers or small technical teams in engineering roles.
• Recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code.
• Strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, and runtimes.
• Ability to form a clear POV, write critical code, and mentor others.
• Experience building developer-focused products/infrastructure with high quality and performance.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Next.js: write production code, review PRs, debug issues, contribute to framework and systems.
• Lead major technical initiatives from exploration to deployment and follow-through.
• Set technical direction across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, and tooling.
• Investiate performance regressions and production issues; translate learnings into improvements.
• Raise the engineering bar with code quality, testing, performance, reliability, and observability.

Skills

Team leadership

Hands-on engineering

React/Next.js experience

Technical judgment

Communication

Tools

React

Next.js

Caching

Build tooling

Performance debugging

Job description

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead to build and direct a team working on Next.js. This hands-on player/coach role requires you to stay close to code while guiding a small team to do its best work.

You will be an engineer first, and a manager second, contributing to core framework areas, reviewing code, and providing practical coaching. The role emphasizes architectural decisions, performance, and a strong technical vision.