Engineering Lead - Email Platform

PlanHub is the leading pre-construction SaaS platform and marketplace helping general contractors, subcontractors, and suppliers connect and grow their businesses. Built with tradespeople in mind, PlanHub is designed around the user workflow to help boost productivity, maintain deadlines, increase revenue, and create relationships. Easily post projects or submit bids with anytime-anywhere collaboration for every commercial construction trade.

We are looking for an Engineering Lead to join our team. This is an opportunity for a hands-on technical leader to guide the architecture and evolution of PlanHub’s critical email delivery platform. You will manage a team of 2-3 engineers to build and maintain reliable, scalable systems to support business critical communication workflows. The ideal candidate possesses deep expertise in building and maintaining fault tolerant distributed systems, application development, and modern cloud native stacks including Aurora MySQL, AWS, and Terraform / OpenTofu. Success requires fluency in AI-powered development, utilizing tools like Claude Code to accelerate delivery and enhance code quality.

Your main area of focus will be PlanHub's email delivery platform — a critical piece of

infrastructure that keeps our marketplace running. When general contractors post projects, subcontractors submit bids, and suppliers respond to opportunities, email is what connects them. Reliable, timely delivery isn't just a technical requirement; it directly drives the revenue and relationships that sit at the heart of PlanHub's business. 

You will integrate AI-driven insights and predictive analytics into our processes to ensure that the right contractors and suppliers are notified about the right opportunities.

What you will be doing:

• Lead the technical direction, design, and continuous improvement of PlanHub's email delivery systems, focusing on decoupling service boundaries, event driven architecture, and operational resilience.
• Architect and implement cloud-native solutions using AWS services, including building and evolving infrastructure as code with Terraform / OpenTofu and containerized workloads deployed via ECS.
• Manage, support, and mentor a team of engineers, promoting sound software architecture, cloud-native practices, observability, and operational excellence.
• Champion reliability, scalability, fault tolerance, and observability across the platform, utilizing tools like Datadog for monitoring, alerting, and incident investigation.
• Establish patterns for safely and effectively using AI coding agents, such as Claude Code, across design, implementation, debugging, and maintenance to improve developer productivity.
• Partner with product and engineering leadership to translate business needs into scalable technical solutions and contribute to roadmap planning.
• Partner with application and infrastructure teams across the engineering organization to elevate technical practices, drive architectural consistency, and improve overall engineering maturity.

What you will need to be successful:

• 8+ years of experience in software engineering, backend systems, or platform development.
• 3+ years in a technical leadership role (Staff, Principal, Team Lead, or Architect) with experience managing and mentoring engineering teams.
• Strong experience and deep understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, and integration patterns, with a proven ability to design, deliver, and operate observable, resilient, and scalable production systems.
• Deep expertise in relational databases, specifically MySQL, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.
• Experience leading teams working in PHP or similar dynamically-typed backend languages.
• Extensive experience with AWS services for compute, storage, messaging, monitoring, and operational reliability.
• Experience building and operating containerized applications using orchestration like ECS, and provisioning infrastructure using Terraform and/or OpenTofu.
• Proven ability to lead technical decision-making while remaining hands-on with implementation.
• Experience using AI coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot) to improve software delivery, coupled with strong engineering judgment and quality controls.
• Proficiency with modern development workflows and collaboration tools like GitHub and observability platforms such as Datadog.
• Excellent communication, collaboration, and problem-solving skills in complex production environments.

 Nice to have:

• Experience with high-volume transactional email systems, deliverability concepts, or messaging platforms
• Experience modernizing legacy systems into more scalable and maintainable services
• Experience shaping engineering standards or development practices around AI-assisted software delivery

What's in it for you:

The opportunity to join PlanHub, named to the 2025 Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies, marking our fifth consecutive year on the list—a testament to sustained growth and momentum. You can make an immediate impact as PlanHub moves to dominate the industry!

PlanHub offers:

• An awesome culture where you will be empowered, make an impact, and learn a ton
• Remote friendly
• Open time-off policy
• 401(k)/GRSP plan with a company match

This position will be a remote position within the United States or Canada. Applicants must be authorized to work for any employer within the United States or Canada. We are unable to sponsor or take over sponsorship of an employment Visa at this time.

PlanHub is an equal opportunity employer. We are committed to providing equal employment opportunities to all employees and applicants for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex (including pregnancy, sexual orientation, or gender identity), national origin, age, disability, genetic information, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by applicable federal, state, or local laws. 

PlanHub complies with all applicable laws governing nondiscrimination in employment in every location in which the company operates. This policy applies to all terms and conditions of employment, including recruiting, hiring, placement, promotion, termination, layoff, recall, transfer, leaves of absence, compensation, benefits, training, and development.