Next.js Engineering Lead & Platform Architect

vercel.com; New York (NY); On-site; USD 230,000 - 340,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive compensation and equity

Inclusive healthcare package

Learning and growth support

Flexible time off

Work-from-home budget to outfit space

Job summary

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for Next.js to stay hands-on while guiding a small team. You will contribute directly to the framework, review code, and drive architectural decisions. This role emphasizes technical leadership over traditional people management.

You will collaborate with Product, Design, and other teams to evolve rendering, caching, routing, build systems, and developer tooling across the Vercel platform.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience with hands-on coding.
• Led engineers or small technical teams (team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager).
• Recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code.
• Strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, or open-source systems.
• Ability to form a clear point of view and drive critical code.
• Experience guiding developers and fostering growth within a team.
• Comfort with ambiguity and solving problems from first principles.
• Balance speed and quality with incremental delivery and real-world feedback.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Next.js, write production code, review PRs, and debug issues.
• Lead major technical initiatives from discovery through architecture and rollout.
• Set technical direction across rendering, caching, routing, and tooling.
• Stay close to real problems: analyze performance and production issues.
• Raise the engineering bar with patterns for quality, testing, and reliability.
• Coach engineers through pairing, reviews, and feedback.
• Provide focused people leadership and career development guidance.
• Improve team execution with clear ownership and lightweight planning.
• Partner with Product, Design, Infrastructure, and others to integrate changes.
• Champion open source by engaging with the community and prioritizing priorities.
• Help grow the team by recruiting and onboarding new engineers.

Skills

React

Framework architecture

Open source experience

Distributed infrastructure

Job description

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for Next.js to stay hands-on while guiding a small team. You will contribute directly to the framework, review code, and drive architectural decisions. This role emphasizes technical leadership over traditional people management.

You will collaborate with Product, Design, and other teams to evolve rendering, caching, routing, build systems, and developer tooling across the Vercel platform.