Senior Engineer / Technical Lead (Fractional Early-stage technology startup | Remote)

Roamlii is building digital infrastructure for the visitor economy.

We’re creating a platform that helps people discover places, businesses and experiences based on what actually matters to them, while giving tourism operators and destinations a better way to make their information structured, discoverable and useful across the modern web.

We’re now building the next generation of Roamlii around AI-powered discovery, structured tourism data and a trusted source of truth for tourism businesses. What’s live right now is our earlier version. Our next phase is a truly exciting strategic leap forward.

To do that well, we need a Senior Engineer / Technical Lead (fractional is an option) who can help lead the technology behind it.

This is much more than a senior developer role.

We’re looking for someone who can make strong architectural decisions, manage and develop a small engineering team, make effective use of interns and junior talent, and still get into the code when that’s where they can create the most value.

What you’ll own

You’ll work closely with the founder and product lead to:

• Translate ambitious product direction into practical technical architecture and an executable engineering roadmap
• Lead developers and interns, delegate effectively and make sure engineering time is being used where it creates the greatest impact
• Break complex initiatives into clear workstreams, priorities and dependencies
• Establish engineering standards, review work and help less experienced developers become increasingly independent
• Make sound technical decisions while parts of the product and business are still evolving
• Identify technical risks, bottlenecks and infrastructure needs before they become problems
• Build alongside the team when hands-on engineering is the best use of your time
• Continuously monitor UX/UI performance with an outcome-based approach from a user perspective

Data is a major part of the job

Roamlii aims to become a trusted digital source of truth for tens of thousands of tourism businesses.

That creates a significant data engineering challenge, as well as a critical requirement for effective data analysis.

We need to continuously collect, structure, verify, maintain, secure, distribute and analyse large amounts of business and destination data.

You’ll help design the systems that allow us to:

• Reliably scrape and ingest information from many different sources
• Clean, normalise, deduplicate and enrich messy real-world data
• Maintain provenance, freshness and confidence across changing business information
• Design secure and scalable data storage and processing architecture
• Build systems for ongoing data validation and purification
• Create APIs and feeds that allow structured information to move between Roamlii and external platforms
• Syndicate authorised business information across destination organisations, platforms and other distribution channels
• Make structured data readily usable by our own discovery and AI systems
• Build the infrastructure required for increasingly large and complex datasets without creating an operational nightmare
• Implement a comprehensive analytics process to monitor platform usage, identify trends and inform product decisions.

Our broader environment includes Next.js, API-driven applications, Google Cloud, GitHub, AI/ML systems, embeddings, vector search and large structured datasets.

You don’t need to be the world’s foremost expert in every part of that stack. We care much more about whether you understand how to design reliable systems around it and can lead other people in building them.

You’ll probably be a strong fit if you:

• Have led engineers before, formally or informally
• Know how to get leverage from a team rather than trying to build everything yourself
• Are comfortable mentoring junior developers and interns while still holding a high technical bar
• Have designed and shipped real production systems, not just individual features
• Can move comfortably between architecture, data, infrastructure and application development
• Have meaningful experience with data pipelines, APIs, scraping, ETL/ELT or large structured datasets
• Think seriously about data quality, security, provenance and maintainability
• Understand modern AI application architecture beyond simply connecting an interface to an LLM
• Can work effectively when requirements are still taking shape
• Know when something requires careful architectural thinking and when the team should simply build it
• Communicate clearly and proactively in a remote environment
• Find early-stage ambiguity energising rather than frustrating

Most importantly, we want someone who wants to help evolve the technology, data infrastructure and engineering team behind what Roamlii is becoming.

Why Roamlii

Travel discovery is still remarkably fragmented.

Useful information lives across thousands of individual websites, destination organisations, maps, booking platforms, social channels and databases. Visitors are increasingly expecting conversational, personalised and AI-powered ways to explore, but the data infrastructure underneath tourism wasn’t built for that world.

We’re working to change that.

That means building both the visitor-facing technology people interact with and the data infrastructure that makes those experiences possible.

This is a fractional role for someone who wants to get involved early, have meaningful influence over the technical direction of the company and help build a platform with the potential to become foundational infrastructure for the visitor economy.

If that sounds like the kind of problem you’d enjoy sinking your teeth into, I’d love to talk.