Lead Engineer

Location
New York (in-person, 4 days/week)
Compensation
$200k–250k base + equity
Type
Full-time

About us

Nara is a creator commerce platform built on a simple premise: creators should be able to build a business that outlasts the algorithm.

Over the past six months we've worked with 100+ creators, and they all surface the same problem. They're stuck chasing reach, while the demand and revenue already sitting inside their own audience goes unseen. Nara reads that audience like a strategist would — finding the signal in the noise and turning it into something a creator can act on in an afternoon.

The creator economy is on its way to half a trillion dollars. We're a small, senior, in-person team, backed by Paradigm, Circle, and other blue-chip investors, and we're weeks from launching v1.

This is a stealth role. We'll share the full picture — product, team, roadmap — in the first conversation.

The role

We're hiring a Lead Engineer to lead our engineering function and work shoulder-to-shoulder with Product, GTM and Design. This is a B2B product that involves traditional desktop and mobile app development but also a deep understanding of state of the art AI/LLM infrastructure and tooling. You'll ship code, set technical direction and lead the engineering function to bring Nara to market at scale. Success in this role brings significant upward mobility within the company.

You'd be joining a stellar engineering team who has built and shipped v1, and taking the lead on what comes next: defining v2, setting technical direction, and shipping code alongside them. It's B2B software for creators, which in practice means consumer-grade craft applied to a professional tool — it has to feel effortless and it can't look like AI.

Our stack

Go and Postgres on the backend, with Temporal orchestrating our agentic and data workflows. React and TypeScript across web and mobile, sharing a generated API client. Stripe for payments, MCP for our agent tooling.

We care more that you've made hard architectural calls under real constraints than that you've used this exact stack — but you should be comfortable in Go, or eager to be within your first month.

Responsibilities

  • Lead engineering on a newly launched B2B product spanning web and mobile
  • Define and build v2 with the team: payments, third-party integrations (social platform APIs, email and messaging, commerce), and features built on data gathering and agentic workflows
  • Set technical direction — stack decisions, devops and database management, code quality, and release process
  • Raise the team's throughput: how work gets scoped, sequenced, reviewed and shipped
  • Work directly with Product, GTM and Design across the full release cycle, and translate a defined roadmap into a sequence the team can execute against

Who are you?

  • A full-stack engineer excited by what AI can do for the creator economy — and clear-eyed about where it doesn't help
  • You've shipped consumer or B2B products that people actually love, at scale
  • Comfortable being accountable for the call: deciding on incomplete information, being opinionated, owning the outcome, pivoting when the evidence says to
  • You get more done through a strong team than on your own, and you'd rather earn technical credibility than assume it
  • A strong communicator who thrives when context is shared openly and decisions get made fast
  • You want to see your work in the wild, not in a backlog

Requirements

  • 7+ years of software engineering, including shipping B2B or consumer products end-to-end
  • Strong backend fundamentals in Go — or a systems language you'd port from quickly — plus enough React/TypeScript to own the path from API to UI
  • Experience in one or more of: e-commerce, loyalty/rewards, creator economy, marketplaces, or consumer social
  • NYC-based, or committed to relocating

Nice to have

  • Lead, staff, or founding engineer experience at an early-stage startup
  • Durable execution or workflow orchestration (Temporal, Restate, or similar)
  • Stripe, stablecoins, or comparable payments infrastructure
  • Data pipelines, or applied LLM features in production — retrieval, agents, evals

Why this role

  • Fast trajectory: demonstrated short-term path to upward mobility
  • Small, senior, in-person team with backing and a clear product thesis
  • Meaningful stake in the upside through equity

Benefits

  • Competitive equity compensation
  • 4 weeks PTO + Winter Holiday Break
  • Comprehensive Health, Dental, and Vision Insurance
  • Work from our vibrant SoHo HQ, with the chance to travel as part of the role
  • Company issued hardware

Apply for this role

Apply now

Nara is an equal opportunity employer. We do not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, color, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, or disability status.