Staff Software Engineer

Lori Vision Studio is building WowNow, a connected consumer-creation platform spanning consumer-facing WebApp/App experiences, internal Admin operations, backend services, and integrations with physical production devices. We are hiring a hands-on Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead to establish technical ownership of our U.S. software platform and help a growing engineering team deliver reliable, maintainable products.

Our immediate challenge is to stabilize and incrementally modernize inherited codebases while continuing to ship business-critical features. This is a senior individual-contributor technical leadership role with meaningful architectural decision authority—not a purely advisory architect role, a people-management position, or a product-management role.

Architecture, Legacy Modernization & Technical Decision-Making

• Conduct a hands-on audit of existing frontend, backend, database, infrastructure, and deployment architecture; identify security, reliability, scalability, and maintainability risks and deliver a prioritized remediation roadmap.
• Lead stabilization and incremental modernization of inherited legacy codebases; define module boundaries, service responsibilities, API contracts, data flows, and architecture decision records while avoiding unnecessary rewrites.
• Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for the U.S. software platform; lead design reviews, approve critical architectural changes, set engineering standards, and elevate unacceptable release risks.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy, refactoring, migration, and technical-debt tradeoffs against delivery capacity and business impact.

Hands-on Engineering, Code Quality & Mentorship

• Personally inspect, debug, refactor, and contribute production code across React/TypeScript applications and backend services; lead by example in complex problem-solving.
• Establish actionable coding standards, peer-review practices, branch protection, automated checks, and risk-based approval requirements without becoming the bottleneck for every pull request.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, constructive code review, technical documentation, and clear design feedback; improve the team’s ability to work independently.

Backend Architecture & Cross-System Reliability

• Design and review production backend services, APIs, relational data models, transactions, concurrency, authentication/authorization, and secure data access.
• Strengthen critical order, payment, user-account, Admin, asynchronous-job, and event-driven workflows with idempotency, retry handling, observability, and failure recovery.
• Own technical contracts and integration quality between U.S. WebApp/Admin/backend systems and China-based TimeForge device R&D; establish joint integration-test expectations.

Engineering Delivery, Quality & Production Operations

• Take technical ownership of engineering delivery: realistic implementation planning, clear technical task ownership, effective reviews, and predictable production-ready releases in partnership with Product and QA.
• Improve CI/CD, testability, environment consistency, monitoring, incident response, feature flags or staged releases, rollback readiness, and secure deployment practices.
• Lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions for critical production incidents; build preventive controls and track recurring failure patterns.
• Partner with QA to establish risk-based unit, integration, API, end-to-end, regression, and release-acceptance coverage for critical customer and operational journeys.

Cross-functional Leadership

• Work with Product Managers to clarify user journeys, business rules, edge cases, acceptance criteria, technical dependencies, and delivery tradeoffs; collaborate with UI/UX on implementation quality.
• Communicate architectural decisions, technical risks, remediation priorities, and delivery status clearly to U.S. leadership and distributed teams.
• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated depth, with technical ownership of multiple production systems or substantial platforms.
• Strong hands-on backend engineering experience with Go, Node.js, Java, or comparable server-side technologies, including relational databases, transactions, API design, asynchronous workflows, and distributed failure handling.
• Proven experience auditing or modernizing inherited or legacy systems, making pragmatic refactoring decisions, and improving code quality while continuing business delivery.
• Demonstrated architectural decision-making, substantial code review, technical mentorship, production troubleshooting, and incident root-cause analysis.
• Practical experience with automated testing, CI/CD, secure development, observability, and safe production releases.
• Ability to remain hands-on while guiding a small engineering team and collaborating with PM, Design, QA, and distributed engineering partners.
• Experience with Go/go-zero, Node.js/Fastify, Vue-based Admin systems, PostgreSQL, Redis, RabbitMQ, MQTT, REST/gRPC, or event-driven architecture.
• AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, infrastructure automation, production monitoring, and cloud-cost awareness.
• E-commerce, payments, order lifecycle, fulfillment, multi-role operational platforms, or connected-device integrations.
• Experience improving engineering delivery in an early-stage company or a small team inheriting a low-quality codebase.
• Experience working across U.S. and China engineering teams or other distributed technical organizations.

Own technical architecture, code quality, engineering standards, and release-readiness practices for U.S. consumer applications, Admin, backend services, and related integrations. This role leads technical direction and mentoring but does not directly manage Product Managers. China device R&D retains ownership of TimeForge application-layer software, machine control, firmware, CAM/G-code, and related device implementation. Cross-system contracts, integration testing, and incident coordination are shared responsibilities.

Success in the First 90 Days

• First 30 days — Deliver a current-state architecture map, critical user-journey dependency map, code and production-risk audit, and prioritized remediation plan with clear severity and ownership.
• By 60 days — Put practical code-review and release standards into operation, introduce automated quality gates, and implement a targeted improvement to at least one high-risk module.
• By 90 days — Establish recurring technical design reviews, measurable release-readiness criteria with QA, and demonstrate improvement in the stability, testability, or maintainability of a critical product workflow.

Compensation & Employment

Proposed annual base salary: $168,000–$204,000, subject to internal approval. Final compensation will reflect experience, demonstrated technical depth, and responsibilities. Benefits and any additional compensation will be confirmed before external publication.

Lori Vision Studio Inc. is committed to fair and inclusive hiring. Applicants with equivalent expertise gained through nontraditional career paths are encouraged to apply.