Lead Software Engineer
The Knot WorldwideWHAT WE DO MATTERS:
At The Knot Worldwide, we champion celebration - and that starts with celebrating our people. Our employees are passionate dreamers, thoughtful doers, and lifelong learners who power meaningful moments for millions around the world. We’re united by authentic connection, shared purpose, and a deep commitment to the global community we serve. Here, flexibility and belonging go hand in hand with high performance. Driven by our core values, we believe the best ideas come from empowered teams: those who consistently collaborate with intention to design solutions, spark ideas, and drive impact. Our people are at the heart of our success.
ABOUT THE ROLE AND OUR TEAM:
The Knot Worldwide is looking for a highly motivated, full-stack Lead Software Engineer to join the Planning & Marketplace – Thunders team. In this role, you will combine hands-on technical leadership with active contribution, helping the team deliver business value while ensuring strong engineering practices, sound architectural decisions, and high technical quality. You will drive technical direction, mentor engineers, and work on complex user and system problems alongside a talented, collaborative team.
Thunders is a cross-functional Marketplace team responsible for building and evolving core experiences that help couples discover, evaluate, and connect with vendors across The Knot platforms. The team operates in a complex environment that blends legacy systems with modern services, owning critical user journeys and continuously evolving its architecture to improve scalability, reliability, and developer experience.
We work in small, agile teams that move fast, with strong ownership over systems end-to-end, including infrastructure, data flows, APIs, and web applications. As a Lead Engineer, you will be deeply involved in delivery while collaborating closely with Product and Design throughout the full SDLC, balancing short-term execution with long-term technical health.
In the near term, this role will have a strong focus on backend systems, APIs, integrations, and infrastructure, with ongoing initiatives to re-architect and modernize key parts of the Marketplace platform. If you enjoy navigating ambiguity, optimizing data flows, designing scalable and observable services, and leading teams through technical change, we would love to speak with you.
RESPONSIBILITIES:
- Lead a talented team of full-stack, software engineers
- Will spend at least 30-40% time as an individual contributor directly writing and reviewing code
- Collaborate closely with distributed teams in the United States
- Foster a culture of quality and ownership
- Collaborate closely with product managers and other engineering teams at all stages of product development and launch
- Work closely with business stakeholders to deliver value to internal users and business partners
- Act as a liaison between the development team and stakeholders
- Actively participate in the ideation and execution of product roadmap.
- Contribute to the development of codebase (Node,React, AWS)
- Lead and facilitate decision making during technical meetings
- Ensure the continuous improvement of engineering and product processes
- Leverage skills and experience to implement product features that are well architected, tested, and understandable.
- Promote best practices surrounding TDD, continuous integration, code standards, etc.
- Provide mentorship to all members of the team, coaching team members on their personal and career development.
SUCCESSFUL LEAD ENGINEER CANDIDATES HAVE:
- 7+ years of overall engineering experience, with a strong background in building production systems.
- 5+ years of hands-on experience building JavaScript-based frontend applications and/or scalable backend APIs using JavaScript and/or PHP.
- Solid experience with React and Node.js, including modern frameworks such as Next.js and Nest.js.
- Proven experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable APIs using REST and/or GraphQL.
- Strong understanding of asynchronous programming, authentication and authorization patterns (e.g. JWT), and API integrations.
Systems, Data & Infrastructure
- Experience working with relational databases, caching, and search technologies (e.g. PostgreSQL, Redis, Elasticsearch).
- Familiarity with distributed systems, eventually consistent data models, and message-driven architectures (e.g. RabbitMQ, SNS/SQS).
- Experience deploying, monitoring, and operating services on AWS; familiarity with Docker and Kubernetes is a plus.
- Hands-on experience with observability and monitoring tools (e.g. New Relic, PagerDuty, SumoLogic).
Engineering Excellence
- Strong grasp of design patterns and anti-patterns, with the ability to make pragmatic architectural trade-offs.
- Experience working in Agile environments, including TDD and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub, Jenkins).
- Proven ability to debug and resolve issues in both development and production environments.
- Experience driving continuous improvement across code quality, architecture, processes, and team productivity.
Leadership & Collaboration
- Ability to translate business goals into technical solutions, balancing delivery speed with long-term technical health.
- Comfortable operating in distributed teams across multiple geographies and time zones.
- Strong communication skills, both written and verbal, with a collaborative and pragmatic mindset.
- Experience mentoring other engineers and leading by example through high-quality code.
- Pair programming experience is a plus.
- B.S. in Computer Science or equivalent experience is a plus.
At The Knot Worldwide, we believe you are more than a resume and invite you to go for it, take the leap of faith, and apply for this job. Together, we have an incredible opportunity to make it even easier for our customers to plan life’s most meaningful moments and for our small business owners to grow and scale. We would love to have you with us on our journey.
WHAT WE LOVE ABOUT YOU:
- Commit to our customers: You act as one team on behalf of our customers. You lead with head and heart, and build what matters for life's most meaningful moments.
- Raise the bar: You define "great" and work backwards. You don't just accept how it's been done, but boldly define how it should be. You are unafraid to innovate, learn, and keep moving forward toward our shared vision.
- Be all in: You believe in our mission and take ownership of your work. You debate openly to reach the best outcomes, speaking with clarity and care, embracing diverse perspectives, then commit fully.
- Celebrate impact: You measure success by the outcomes you create. You hold yourself accountable to delivering value, while recognizing progress and the lessons learned along the way. You love to win, together.
WHAT YOU LOVE ABOUT US:
We believe in a wide range of holistic offerings to support our employees so that they can live our values day in and day out. From mental wellbeing, physical health and financial planning, to engaging perks and discounts, we are in the business of celebrating and supporting the Moments that Matter, both in and out of the office.. We offer flexible vacation, generous parental leave, and prioritize initiatives that support the growth, development, and happiness of our people.
- For Together@TKWW-eligible roles, this includes regular in-office time to foster collaboration and connection.
- For roles not eligible for in-office expectations, we support connection through virtual collaboration and intentional gatherings.
To facilitate in-person collaboration, we have office spaces in Barcelona, Spain; Delhi, India; Galway, Ireland; London, England; New York, NY; and Washington, D.C.
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US Notice: The Knot Worldwide provides equal employment opportunities (EEO) to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, or disability. In addition to federal law requirements, The Knot Worldwide complies with applicable state and local laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company has facilities. The Knot Worldwide expressly prohibits any form of workplace harassment based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, genetic information, disability, or veteran status.
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