Technical Lead

About HeartStamp HeartStamp is an AI-native hyperpersonalization platform for greeting cards, invitations, and gifting. Users create deeply personal, professionally printed physical cards and digital 3D cards through a guided AI experience powered by our proprietary HEART framework and a conversational assistant called Stampy. We support any language, any art style, any occasion — and we generate production-ready, print-perfect output (PDF/X, 300 DPI CMYK) fulfilled through our print-on-demand partner network. We launch our MVP in April 2026 and are scaling across the US, UK, and Canada with a long product roadmap ahead: digital product, wide-format gifting and a hyperpersonalization engine that learns each customer over time. We’re a bootstrapped, founder-led team of 20+ across engineering, product, design, and growth. This is not a venture-backed burn machine. We move fast, we ship, and we build to win. The Role We’re looking for a Tech Lead who can own the technical vision and execution of our platform while staying deeply hands-on in the codebase. This is a player-coach role weighted heavily toward playing — expect to spend 60–70% of your time writing, reviewing, and debugging production code. You set architecture direction and lead the engineering team, but you’re building alongside them every day. You’re not here to draw diagrams and delegate. You’re here to build. This role is particularly focused on our AI/RAG systems, semantic search infrastructure, image generation pipeline, and DevOps/infrastructure strategy — the engine that makes Stampy smart, our card creation experience magical, and our platform reliable and cost-efficient at scale. You’ll be leading a team of full-stack engineers, a RAG engineer, an AI orchestration engineer, a DevOps engineer, and a QA lead. What You’ll Do • Own the Architecture. Define and maintain the end-to-end technical architecture spanning our Python backend, Next.js frontend, AI/RAG pipelines, vector search infrastructure, and cloud platform. Make the hard calls on tooling, patterns, and trade-offs. • Build the AI Brain. Lead development of our RAG pipeline — semantic search across art styles, card imagery, customer preferences, and cultural/environmental knowledge using PostgreSQL/pgvector, LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith. Improve hallucination handling, prompt engineering, content validation, evaluation frameworks, and multi-model inference routing across our model-agnostic architecture. • Own Infrastructure and DevOps. Take direct ownership of our AWS infrastructure strategy, cost optimization, autoscaling, and production reliability. We need someone who can architect for zero-floor scaling (no idle burn), manage Kubernetes clusters efficiently, maintain CI/CD pipelines, and ensure we’re not bleeding money on compute as we go to market. This is not a “hand it to the DevOps guy” role — you set the strategy and hold the team accountable to it. • Ship Production Code. This is not a "meetings and Jira role." You write code. You review code. You debug production issues. You harness the full potential of Claude Opus 4.6 and Codex 5.3 to move at a velocity that would require three engineers without AI acceleration — and you expect the same from your team. • Lead the Team. Run sprint planning, code reviews, architecture discussions, and daily standups for a distributed engineering team across multiple time zones. Set engineering standards, unblock developers, and build a culture of ownership, velocity, and quality. • Drive Print-Ready Output. Our product isn’t pixels on a screen — it’s a physical card that arrives in someone’s mailbox. You’ll ensure our generation pipeline produces print-perfect results: correct color profiles, bleed zones, resolution, and format compliance through our DocRaptor/PrinceXML print pipeline. • Scale the Platform. Build for international expansion (multi-currency, multi-language, multi-partner routing), product extension (digital 3D cards, invitations, gifting), and a future creator marketplace with royalty structures via Stripe Connect. What We’re Looking For • 6+ years of engineering experience with a proven track record of designing and building complex, scalable production systems. You’ve been a tech lead or senior architect before — not just in title, but in practice. • Deep backend expertise in Python/FastAPI. Our backend is Python. You need to be authoritative here, not just competent. • Real RAG and vector search experience. You’ve built or substantially contributed to production RAG pipelines. You understand pgvector (or comparable vector databases), embedding strategies, retrieval optimization, semantic search, evaluation, and orchestration with LangChain, LangGraph, and LangSmith. Bonus if your RAG experience includes image-based retrieval, not just text. • Full-stack capability. You’re comfortable in React/Next.js, TypeScript, and modern frontend patterns. You don’t need to be a frontend specialist, but you can build and review production UI code. • Strong DevOps and infrastructure chops. You’ve deployed and operated production systems on AWS with Kubernetes, managed CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions), and understand containerized microservices architecture. You have a track record of infrastructure cost optimization — autoscaling, right-sizing, zero-floor strategies — not just provisioning. Terraform/IaC experience preferred. • AI-native workflow. You use Claude, Codex, Cursor, or similar tools as force multipliers in your daily work. You understand the capabilities and limitations of current foundation models and can architect systems that leverage them intelligently. • Current, hands-on coding proficiency. We will evaluate your ability to read, write, and debug production code as part of our interview process. We’re looking for someone whose technical skills are sharp and current — not a leader who’s drifted away from the codebase. You should be able to identify anomalous patches, trace upstream data flows, and reason through causal relationships in code. • QA-driven engineering mindset. You believe in testing, validation, and non-functional requirement verification as engineering disciplines, not afterthoughts. • Strong team orchestration skills. You can lead code reviews, set engineering standards, unblock developers, and manage a distributed async team without micromanaging. You communicate clearly in writing. • Bias toward action with architectural discipline. You ship fast but you don’t ship sloppy. You know when to take a shortcut and when to do it right. You’ve built systems from zero-to-one and know the difference between overengineering and building for scale. Our Tech Stack Frontend Next.js 15, React 18, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, ShadCN UI, Konva.js (canvas editor) Backend/API FastAPI (Python 3.10+), PostgreSQL, pgvector, Redis, Celery AI/ML LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, model-agnostic orchestration (Gemini, xAI Grok, OpenRouter), RAG pipelines, content validation microservices Infrastructure AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, S3), Kubernetes (K3s), GitHub Actions, Docker, Terraform PDF/Print DocRaptor (PrinceXML), Cloudinary, ICC color management Payments & Auth Stripe Connect, Clerk Search & CMS Typesense, Sanity Observability Sentry, LangSmith, PostHog Collaboration GitHub, Linear, Slack, Notion, Figma Compensation $96,000–$120,000 USD/year ($8,000–$10,000/month) Structure Full-time independent contractor, monthly retainer Hours 50 hours/week baseline, with flexibility during critical sprint phases, launches, and production incidents Location Remote, global. Overlap with US time zones required for team syncs. Note: This compensation range reflects US-based cost of living. We welcome applicants from outside the United States, but please understand that compensation will be adjusted to reflect local market rates and cost of living. Why HeartStamp • You’re not joining a feature factory. You’re architecting a platform that bridges AI and physical products — greeting cards today, a full gifting ecosystem tomorrow. • The AI challenge is real. Our RAG system has to understand art styles, emotional tone, cultural context, relationship dynamics, and print production constraints — all in one generation pass. This isn’t a chatbot wrapper. • You’ll have ownership. This is a small, high-output team where your decisions shape the product directly. No layers of middle management. You report to the CEO. • The team is already strong. You’re not inheriting a mess. You’re inheriting a shipped MVP with a solid engineering team, a clear product roadmap, and revenue. Your job is to level it up. Skills Python  |  FastAPI  |  PostgreSQL  |  pgvector  |  RAG  |  LangChain  |  LangGraph  |  LangSmith  |  Vector Search  |  Semantic Search  |  Next.js  |  React  |  TypeScript  |  AWS  |  Kubernetes  |  Docker  |  Terraform  |  CI/CD  |  DevOps  |  Infrastructure Cost Optimization  |  Stripe Connect  |  Generative AI  |  Image Generation  |  Print Production  |  Team Leadership  |  Code Review  |  System Architecture