Leads and grows a frontend-focused development team, establishes architecture and engineering practices, drives frontend roadmap execution, reduces technical debt, improves reliability and security, partners with Product and the CTO, and mentors developers. The role oversees SaaS production systems, cloud platforms, APIs, microservices, customer-focused solutions, incident response, and engineering priorities.
Who We Are
Studio Designer powers the business side of interior design firms. With intuitive, purpose-built tools, designers can capture and organize hundreds of project details, track time, manage orders and instantly access essential financial information in one centralized system. Over 20,000 designers rely on Studio Designer to do more of what they do best!
Join our team of designers, technologists, and customer success professionals as we create forward-thinking business software exclusively for interior designers. We uphold our values by fostering a collaborative and creative environment that embraces uniqueness and prioritizes the well-being of our team and customers alike!
The Role
As our Director, Development, you will lead a development team responsible for crafting, building, and maintaining the key features as well as pieces of frontend infrastructure that support our all-in-one platform for our customers to collaborate and drive their businesses using Studio Designer.
Your main responsibilities include guiding and supporting the team in solving the most impactful customer and product challenges, establishing a strong technical direction for our frontend architecture and development practices, supporting engineers in their career development and growth, and balancing overall project priorities, team morale, technical debt, product quality, and customer needs. You will report to and work directly with our Chief Technology Officer (CTO).
What You’ll Do
- Lead, expand, and mature a small team of developers.
- Work alongside the CTO to develop strategic direction for architecture, development (with a heavy emphasis on frontend), and team culture, considering both reactive and proactive approaches.
- Cultivate a culture of security, incident analysis, and learning.
- Identify, prioritize, and execute opportunities to support and enable development teams with availability, performance, efficiency, resiliency, organizational change, and incident response.
- Lead the development and execution of a frontend roadmap that delivers intuitive, performant, accessible, and reliable experiences for our customers.
- Partner closely with Product to translate customer needs and product requirements into thoughtful, scalable frontend solutions.
- Collaborate with Development leaders and Product Managers to manage execution and prioritization across frontend initiatives.
- Lead efforts to reduce frontend technical debt and improve the scalability, maintainability, and consistency of our frontend architecture.
- Coach and mentor developers and peers to propagate reliability best practices across Development.
What You’ll Need
- Technical knowledge and depth to develop and mentor others as well as build credibility with your team.
- Experience interacting with customers, senior executives, and business leads.
- Experience establishing and measuring OKRs or team goals.
- Critical thinking and the ability to engage in constructive conflict.
- Excellent written and verbal communication skills.
- Comfortable leading multiple and often contending priorities, including making and communicating decisions.
- Regularly consider business lens and tradeoffs even for deeply technical development problems.
- Industry experience in interior design is a plus.
- 10+ years’ experience in software development or hands-on site reliability engineering of fault-tolerant distributed systems.
- Experience operating SaaS software systems in a production environment.
- Experience with AWS or other major cloud providers.
- Experience developing development platforms and services (e.g., microservices, APIs)
- Experience architecting, designing, and building frontend components and applications connecting to new or established services
- Strong experience and solid understanding of all of the following: JSON, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, WinForms, and Web Services/Web API.
- UI testing frameworks such as Playwright or other testing tools, such as NUnit or MS Test.
- Experience or desire to work with and in an AI-driven environment and tooling.
- Extensive experience utilizing hands-on development practices using Angular (strongly preferred, Typescript, or similar tools.
What You’ll Ideally Have
- Strong Object-Oriented foundation, including formal process/methodology experience (Rational, etc.)
- Large-scale, cloud-based development with SOA or micro-services.
- .NET (Core, 5+ preferred).
- Mobile or mobile web development experience.
- Ability to work in Central or Mountain time zone.
Base pay range
$150,000—$175,000 USD
Our Offerings
- Remote first!
- States not included in remote options are: Hawaii, Mississippi, Rhode Island, South Dakota, and West Virginia.
- Medical, Dental, and Vision insurance
- Involuntary and Voluntary Life and AD&D insurance
- Voluntary Long-term Disability
- HSA with employer match
- Voluntary Pet Insurance
- Flexible paid time off, company-paid holidays, and parental leave
- 401(k) plan with employer match
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Studio Designer is an equal opportunity employer.
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