Director of Engineering

Leafwell is a pioneering technology and data company advancing the application of medical cannabis through patient access, research, and education. As the Director of Engineering, you will own the technical direction and delivery of the engineering organization, managing a lean team and ensuring high-quality product execution.

Responsibilities:

• Lead, mentor, and manage all engineers across the organization, including in-house staff and a contracted engineering team of 2–3 developers
• Set technical direction and architectural standards for Leafwell's platform, built on Node.js, TypeScript, React, and AWS (Lambda, AppSync, EventBridge, S3, CloudFormation, CDK, and related services)
• Remain hands-on: contribute to architecture decisions, conduct code reviews, and write production code in critical areas
• Own engineering planning and execution—sprint cadence, release management, incident response, and capacity planning across in-house and contract resources
• Drive the adoption of agentic development frameworks and intelligent automation, evaluating tools and patterns (e.g., LangChain, CrewAI, or similar) that improve workflows without introducing unnecessary complexity
• Partner closely with Product, Design, and business stakeholders to translate roadmap priorities into well-scoped technical plans
• Establish and evolve engineering best practices: CI/CD pipelines, testing strategy, observability, documentation, and on-call processes
• Manage the relationship with our contracting partner, ensuring alignment on priorities, quality standards, and delivery timelines
• Build a culture of ownership, continuous improvement, and pragmatic innovation within the engineering team
• Oversee infrastructure and DevOps practices, whether directly or through a dedicated infrastructure-focused engineer, ensuring reliability, security, and cost efficiency on AWS
• Contribute to hiring decisions, performance management, and professional development for all engineering team members

Requirements:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3 years in an engineering leadership role (Engineering Manager, Director, or equivalent) where you managed engineers directly
• Deep, hands-on proficiency with Node.js, TypeScript and React in production environments. You can still architect a service, debug a gnarly issue, and ship a feature
• Strong experience with AWS core services (Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudWatch, S3, ECS, CloudFormation, CDK) and cloud-native architecture patterns
• Demonstrated experience managing mixed teams—coordinating across in-house engineers and external contractors or agencies
• Familiarity with agentic or autonomous system frameworks and a genuine interest in exploring how AI-driven workflows can improve engineering productivity and product capabilities
• Solid database experience (PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MySQL) and comfort designing data models, writing performant queries, and managing schema migrations
• Experience designing and scaling RESTful APIs (GraphQL experience is a bonus), with a strong understanding of authentication, authorization, and API security
• A track record of establishing or improving engineering processes—sprint planning, code review practices, CI/CD, incident management—in a growing organization
• Excellent communication skills. You can translate between technical depth and business context, and you build trust across functions
• A pragmatic, low-ego leadership style. You are comfortable rolling up your sleeves when the team needs it, and you empower others to do their best work
• Familiarity with Ruby on Rails or similar frameworks is a plus for maintaining legacy services during migration