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).