Lead Developer

We’re looking for a mid-to-senior Lead Developer to take ownership of a core product area within CoEditor: evolving our comment moderation platform into a fully-fledged social and community layer across premium publishing brands.

This is not a maintenance role. You will be responsible for architecting, building, and scaling a real-time, user-facing platform that sits at the centre of audience engagement, identity, and retention.

What You’ll Do

• Own the technical architecture and roadmap for the comments and community platform
• Lead the evolution from: Comment moderation → Community engagement → Social product (profiles, interactions, identity, notifications, etc.)
• Manage and mentor a distributed engineering team (4–5 developers)
• Drive high-quality, predictable delivery across multiple time zones
• Work closely with product, design, and commercial teams to translate requirements into scalable systems
• Make pragmatic decisions balancing speed, scalability, and maintainability
• Establish best practices across: Code quality, Deployment, Observability, Performance

Core Technical Requirements

You don’t need all of these, but strong experience across most is expected:

Backend / Systems

• Strong experience with Node.js / TypeScript or similar backend stack
• Experience building scalable APIs (REST / GraphQL)
• Deep understanding of distributed systems and microservices architecture
• Experience with event-driven systems (e.g. Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub)

Real-time / Social Systems

• Experience building real-time features:WebSockets / live updates
  Notifications / feeds
• Experience with high-volume user interaction systems (comments, messaging, social feeds)
• Familiarity with moderation systems, trust & safety, or content pipelines is a strong plus

Data & Infrastructure

• Strong experience with PostgreSQL / NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB, MongoDB)
• Experience designing high-performance data models for user activity and interactions
• Cloud infrastructure experience (AWS / GCP / Azure)
• Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and modern DevOps practices

Frontend (working knowledge)

• Comfortable working with modern frontend stacks (React / Next.js)
• Ability to guide frontend architecture (even if not hands-on daily)

Leadership & Delivery

• Proven experience leading small engineering teams (3–6 people)
• Experience working across multiple time zones (Americas + Europe preferred)
• Strong bias toward delivery and accountability
• Able to balance:Hands-on coding
  Team leadership
  Strategic thinking

What Good Looks Like

• You’ve built or contributed to social, community, or high-engagement products
• You’re comfortable operating in fast-moving, product-led environments
• You take ownership and ship, rather than over-engineer
• You can level up a team, not just contribute individually

Why This Role

• Own a greenfield-ish product expansion within an already proven platform
• Work on a core engagement layer that directly drives subscription growth and retention
• Build something closer to a social platform than a traditional comments system
• High autonomy, high impact, and direct influence on product direction

Bonus (but not essential)

• Experience with AI-assisted moderation or content classification
• Experience in publishing, media, or creator platforms
• Prior experience scaling products from early stage → growth