Director of Engineering, Front-end and Ordering Platform (Remote)

About the role

The Director of Engineering, Front-end and Ordering Platform leads the Experience Engineering team at ezCater. This includes owning the front-end platform, the ordering experience, and the entire customer journey from discovery through draft order submission. The role is not a front-end lead but rather focuses on the experience layer that transforms a headless API platform into a product used by both customers and AI agents.

Responsibilities

• Owns the front-end platform and architecture using Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, and Astro, including strategies for micro-frontend composition, monorepo, shared design system, cross-MFE state management, and MFE shell orchestrator.
• Defines the path for building and deploying front-end applications, covering CI/CD, observability, accessibility, performance budgets, and contract testing, across both the marketplace and internal tools channels.
• Owns the full ordering experience, from discovery, personalization, and menu browsing through cart, checkout, and payment, consuming headless backend APIs through BFF layers.
• Drives AI-native front-end development, including design-to-code pipelines, AI-assisted development against organizational context, and AI-powered product features like personalized recommendations, intelligent search, and conversational ordering.
• Ensures front ends are machine-readable and API-first to serve AI agents alongside human users, with awareness of emerging commerce protocols.
• Owns the design system as infrastructure, ensuring design tokens, theming, and cross-platform consistency are packaged and documented for both human engineers and AI code generation workflows.
• Leads and develops three engineering teams, scaling the organization as it grows; recruits and develops engineers and managers, including from minimal staffing.
• Reviews front-end system designs, challenges architectural decisions, and identifies performance issues from technical signals.

Requirements

• Demonstrated experience standing up front-end engineering organizations, not just inheriting them.
• Deep fluency in Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, and modern build tooling (e.g., Turborepo, Rspack), with hands-on architectural credibility.
• Experience leading multi-team web applications with micro-frontend architectures; strong opinions on composition strategies per journey stage and cross-MFE concerns (CSS isolation, state sharing, auth propagation, SSR vs. CSR, contract testing).
• Ownership of a transactional customer journey — discovery, cart, checkout, payment — including BFF architectures and multiple customer types or ordering modes on a single platform.
• Practical AI fluency across front-end work: design-to-code workflows, AI-assisted testing, AI-powered product features, and the infrastructure that makes AI effective (component library docs, API contracts, repository context).
• Design system experience — tokens, theming, cross-platform consistency, documentation for human and AI consumers.
• Expertise in performance and observability: Core Web Vitals, real user monitoring, and performance budgets enforced in CI.
• Experience leading engineering managers, developing teams, and making hard performance calls.
• Ability to travel up to 5 days per quarter for Together Weeks, team gatherings and other events, when applicable.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field.
• Minimum of 8 years of relevant experience in software engineering and front-end development.
• Proven track record of success in leading and growing engineering teams.
• Strong understanding of modern web technologies and best practices.
• Experience with cloud platforms and services (e.g., AWS, Google Cloud, Azure).
• Knowledge of open-source libraries and frameworks (e.g., React, Vue, Angular).
• Experience with microservices architecture and containerization (e.g., Docker, Kubernetes).
• Experience with headless commerce and payment gateways.

Skills

• Strong leadership skills and ability to mentor and develop engineers.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work in a fast-paced, agile environment.
• Experience with Agile methodologies and Scrum.
• Understanding of DevOps principles and practices.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automation tools.
• Knowledge of accessibility standards and best practices.
• Experience with performance optimization techniques.
• Experience with version control systems (e.g., Git).
• Experience with data analytics and metrics-driven decision-making.

Benefits

ezCater offers a market-competitive salary, stock options, 12 paid holidays, flexible PTO, 401K with ezCater match, health/dental/FSA, long-term disability insurance, mental health and family planning resources, remote-hybrid work from our awesome Boston office OR your home OR a mixture of both home and office, a tremendous amount of responsibility and autonomy, and a variety of other perks.

Pay

The national total target cash compensation range for this position, including base salary and bonus target, is $250,000–$334,000 annually.

Schedule

The role is remote-friendly, allowing employees to work from their home or a combination of home and office, depending on the individual’s preference and the nature of the work.