Director of Engineering, Front-end and Ordering Platform

ezCater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US. The company makes it easy for any organization to manage its food needs and order from over 125,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ezCater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from employee meal programs to one-off meetings, all backed by 24/7 service and business-grade reliability. For restaurant partners, ezCater helps grow their business by bringing them new high-value customers and large orders. ezCater is a B2B marketplace for business catering. We are building a ground-up re-architecture of our platform – a headless, channel-agnostic core with AI as a cross-cutting layer. The stack is modern and intentional: Go, PostgreSQL, Kafka (MSK), Temporal, Vespa, SpiceDB, EKS. The front end is a first-class product — every API surface is designed to be consumed by multiple channels (marketplace, internal tools, partner API). 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 What You Have : 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. 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 The national total target cash compensation range for this position, including base salary and bonus target, is $250,000–$334,000 annually.* *Please note: Final offer amounts are determined by multiple factors, including prior experience, expertise and region & may vary from the amount above. This range does not represent additional compensation benefits (such as equity, 401K or medical, dental or vision insurance). ezCater does not sponsor applicants for work visas or legal permanent residence. What You’ll Get from Us: You’ll get a terrifically compelling experience in an innovative, high performing environment. You’ll get to work with engaged and passionate colleagues on challenging and impactful projects. You will have opportunities to grow in your career, and work in a place that values work/life harmony. Oh, and you’ll get all this: 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, and knowing that you helped transform the food for work space. ezCater is an equal opportunity employer. We embrace humans of every background, appearance, race, religion, color, national origin, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, marital status, veteran status, and disability status. At the same time, we do not employ jerks, even brilliant ones. Following a conditional offer of employment, ezCater may require a background check. 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