Build and lead the founding Arena engineering team, hiring high-caliber full-stack engineers and establishing a culture optimized for ownership, speed, and technical rigor
Partner deeply with Product and Design as the engineering co-owner of the Arena growth strategy, shaping experimentation velocity, competition mechanics, and platform evolution during product-market fit discovery
Define and evolve Arena’s technical architecture, ensuring rapid iteration today while preserving clean boundaries and extensibility for future scale
Design systems that handle bursty, marketing-driven traffic patterns, real-time competition state, and leaderboard updates without compromising reliability or coupling risk to NinjaTrader’s core trading infrastructure
Enforce engineering standards for reliability, observability, deployment automation, and operational readiness on Google Cloud Platform, including defining service-level expectations for Arena as an independent vertical
Own Arena’s engineering execution end-to-end, balancing experimentation speed with long-term system health and technical leverage
Design the team’s future organizational shape, identifying when to introduce additional squads and technical leadership as Arena scales post product-market fit
Hire and develop future technical leaders within Arena, building the senior density required to support multi-team growth
Participate in on-call and incident response as an engineering leader, modeling operational accountability and ensuring systems are built for operators as well as developers
Represent Arena engineering strategy in cross-functional and executive discussions, clearly articulating trade-offs between growth velocity, system resilience, and architectural investment.
Requirements
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, a related field, or equivalent practical experience
10+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years in formal engineering management or team lead roles
Proven experience building and shipping consumer-facing web products across the full stack (frontend and backend)
Strong technical fluency in modern web technologies, particularly Node.js and TypeScript on the backend, React on the frontend, and cloud-native architectures
Hands-on understanding of CI/CD pipelines, deployment automation, and infrastructure-as-code practices in cloud environments (AWS, GCP, or Azure)
Experience with relational database design and optimization (PostgreSQL, MySQL), including schema design, query performance tuning, indexing strategies, and data modeling for high-throughput applications
Strong understanding of observability practices, including monitoring, logging, alerting, and debugging production systems, with experience establishing observability standards and tooling for engineering teams
Demonstrated experience designing systems for bursty, high-concurrency traffic, including auto-scaling strategies, queue-based architectures, event-driven systems, and load management for tens of thousands of simultaneous users
Track record of building engineering teams from scratch or near-scratch, including hiring, onboarding, and establishing team culture and processes
Excellent cross-functional collaboration skills, with the ability to partner closely with Product, Design, Marketing, and Data stakeholders to shape product direction and go-to-market strategy
Strong communication skills, with the ability to translate technical concepts for non-technical audiences and align engineering execution with business priorities.