Director of Engineering, Front-end and Ordering Platform

Role Description

You will lead Experience Engineering at ezCater – owning the front-end platform, ordering experience, and the full customer journey from discovery through cart, checkout, and draft order submission. This is not a front-end lead role. You own the experience layer that turns a headless API platform into a product that customers use and that AI agents transact through. You will lead three teams (Discovery Experience, Ordering Experience, and Front-End Platform) and report to the VP of Engineering.

What You'll Do:

• Own front-end platform and architecture across Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, and Astro, including micro-frontend composition strategies, monorepo, shared design system, cross-MFE state management, and MFE shell orchestrator.
• Define the opinionated path for building and deploying front-end applications — CI/CD, observability, accessibility, performance budgets, and contract testing — across both the marketplace and internal tools channels.
• Own the full ordering experience from discovery, personalization, and menu browsing through cart, checkout, and payment, consuming headless backend APIs through BFF layers.
• Drive AI-native front-end development, including design-to-code pipelines (Figma, Claude Design, v0), AI-assisted development against organizational context, and AI-powered product experiences such as personalized recommendations, intelligent search, and conversational ordering.
• Ensure front ends are machine-readable and API-first to serve AI agents alongside human users, with awareness of emerging commerce protocols (MCP, Universal Commerce Protocol).
• Own the design system as infrastructure — design tokens, theming, cross-platform consistency — packaged and documented for both human engineers and AI code generation workflows.
• Lead and develop three engineering teams, scaling the organization as it grows; recruit and develop engineers and managers, including from minimal staffing.
• Hold a high technical bar: review front-end system designs, challenge architectural decisions, and identify performance issues from technical signals.

Qualifications

• 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.

Requirements

• Bonus experience we'd love to see:
• Micro-frontend architectures in production (Multi-Zones, Module Federation, edge composition, Islands architecture).
• Design-to-code pipelines integrating Figma, Claude Design, v0, or similar tools.
• Agentic or AI-powered commerce experiences.
• Internal tools unification under a shared MFE shell.
• Headless commerce architectures consuming OpenAPI contracts with event-driven updates.
• Cloudflare (Workers, reverse proxy, CDN optimization) for edge-based front-end routing.
• Familiarity with Go, Kafka/MSK, Temporal, or PostgreSQL — the backend your front end consumes.

Benefits

• Market competitive salary, stock options that you’ll help make worth a lot.
• 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.
• Wicked awesome co-workers.
• Employee meal program (and many more goodies) when you’re in our office.
• Knowing that you helped transform the food for work space.