Software Engineering Lead

Fully remote · Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, or Thailand · $6,000–$9,000 USD/month

Compensation & employment

●    $6,000 – $9,000 USD/month, based on experience.

●    Time off: flexible. Take what you need, communicate it. Most of the team aims for ~15–20 days/year.

●    Fully remote within Vietnam, Philippines, Indonesia, Malaysia, or Thailand. Travel anywhere you want as long as you can deliver your work and show up for working sessions with the executive team.

How we work

Small team, fully remote, flexible: you can live anywhere and structure your day however you want, with one fixed expectation: Mon - Fri sync with the executive team between 8:30 am–11am SEA time for working sessions and quick decisions. You'd report to the CGO (with regular involvement from the Founder on strategy) and work closely with the backend engineer day one.

We move fast, decide fast, and prefer direct communication - push back early if you disagree.

Why this role exists

GregMat is an EdTech platform that helps tens of thousands of students prepare for graduate admissions tests. 2026 is our year of growth: moving from a founder-led product to a fast-moving operationalized company with better product, broader reach, new offerings, and the engineering foundation to support all of it.

That means engineering needs to ship things we haven't had bandwidth for: experimentation infrastructure, new plan and payment structures, analytics that actually drive decisions, and the groundwork for expanding into adjacent test markets.

Today our engineering team has one backend engineer and one frontend engineer. You'd be the third - and the person we expect to grow into leading the team over the next 12 months, including hiring a UX designer, backend engineer, product manager, and more. This role is built for someone looking to grow into senior engineering leadership.

This isn't a corporate engineering role but a startup role with a profitable business behind it, which is a rare combination.

What you'll do

First 2–3 months - hands-on, full-stack

●    Onboard with our backend engineer and get fluent in our Django 4.2 codebase (Django 5.2 LTS upgrade is on the near-term roadmap).

●    Stand up our experimentation infrastructure (PostHog or similar) so the team can run real product experiments end-to-end - instrumentation, bucketing, and readouts.

●    Ship payment and subscription work in Stripe alongside the backend engineer.

●    Pair with the frontend engineer on checkout, onboarding, and analytics instrumentation (GA4 + GTM today).

●    Get hands dirty on whatever is blocking the team.

Months 4–12 — grow into the lead role

●    Help shape the technical roadmap with the Founder and Chief Growth Officer.

●    Start owning the engineering hiring plan and help bring on the next 1–3 engineers (UX designer, backend, product manager).

●    Set the team's bar for code review, testing, deploys, and on-call.

What we're looking for

●    4+ years building production web apps, with experience on both backend and frontend. You can run a feature end-to-end without handoffs.

●    Ambition to lead: you want to grow into running an engineering team — not eventually, but in 2026.

●    Strong Python/Django: migrations, signals, DRF, Celery. Multi-tenant patterns a plus.

●    Solid frontend: Vue (preferred) or React, plus Nuxt/Next, TailwindCSS, TanStack Query. You don't need to be the best frontend engineer on the team - you need to ship UI competently.

●    Stripe in production: subscriptions, webhooks, customer portal, the failure modes.

●    Product literacy and judgment: you think about what to build and why, not just how. You can push back on the executive team and make your case.

●    Startup instincts: comfort with ambiguity, ownership without being asked, ability to ship before everything is documented. If your last role was at a 500-person company where every change went through three approvals, this probably isn't for you.

●    Hands-on experience with product experimentation: running real A/B tests in production, including instrumentation, bucketing, and reading results. PostHog specifically is a plus; the principles matter more.

Nice to have

●    Prior management or tech lead experience.

●    PostgreSQL query optimization beyond the ORM defaults.

●    Heroku + Docker production experience (our current stack).

●    Worked on a subscription business with meaningful churn dynamics.