Tech Lead - Execution Engine

Why do we love building Make (and why you might, too)?

We’re a team of developers, and it’s second nature for us to whip up a solution with some coding. But what about folks who aren’t developers or don’t have one in their corner? They could get trapped in a monotonous cycle of tedious tasks, shuffling data around, and missing out on doing things that really matter.

That’s where Make comes in. We’ve created a space where anyone can craft powerful automations that are as intuitive and fun as playing a game. We’re here to share the buzz of creating something awesome that works like a charm and to turn everyday individuals into makers.

The Role:

As the Tech Lead for Make’s Execution Engine, you’ll define and drive the technical vision for our most critical component. The Engine powers our customers’ automations — it’s a distributed system of backend services, workers, and databases executing thousands of scenarios per second. It’s the beating heart of the Make platform.

Our codebase has been around for many years already — built before “cloud-first” was the norm. Since then, the system has grown and evolved, but it’s time to take it to the next level: modernize, harden, and make it cloud-native.

This isn’t a people-management role. You’ll lead a small team of 2–3 backend engineers, own technical priorities, and work closely with the Engineering Manager to deliver meaningful, long-term improvements. You’ll lead by example through hands-on coding, thoughtful design, and clear technical direction.

What you’ll be doing:

Imagine being the lead engineer on a plane that’s already in the sky at full capacity. ✈️ Your mission: upgrade its systems and make it fly better — faster, safer, smoother — without interrupting the journey. Sound exciting? Let’s talk.

Specifically, you will:

• Design and implement architectural improvements for Make’s Execution Engine with a focus on simplicity, reliability, scalability, and observability.
• Own and champion the long-term architectural vision for this domain.
• Prioritize your team's work and make critical trade-off decisions about what to build now versus what can wait.
• Write code and tests, review PRs, and design essential dashboards and alerts.
• Operate services at scale, participating in an on-call rotation, incident response, and postmortems.
• Mentor other engineers and actively share your expertise.
• Advise other teams on best practices for integrating with the Engine.

What we expect from you:

You’re a hands-on technical leader who knows how to evolve complex systems without overengineering them. You’ve designed, built, and operated backend services at scale, and you know how to plan for both the next sprint and the next few years.

You thrive on collaboration and understand that great software development is a team sport. You also recognize that building software requires balancing technical excellence with business needs and making pragmatic trade-offs.

Most importantly, you are motivated by the challenge of modernizing a complex, existing system, embracing the realities of a brownfield environment over a greenfield one.

Here’s the scoop on what we’re looking for:

• Typically 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a particular passion for and expertise in backend architecture.
• Typically 2+ years in a technical leadership role, doesn’t have to be management.
• Comprehensive understanding of the end-to-end web development process, from code creation to production deployment.
• Deep understanding of system design, scalability, and reliability principles.
• Experience with Node.js, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Redis,&