Manager of the Technical Staff - Next.js

Vercel is seeking an Engineering Team Lead for the Next.js team. This role combines hands-on software development with technical leadership to build and guide the open source Next.js framework, enabling millions of developers to ship faster with strong performance, security, and developer experience. The role emphasizes technical execution and architecture, working closely with Product, Design, Infra, Developer Experience, and other engineering teams to evolve Next.js across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, and developer tooling. It is a hands-on player/coach position where you will contribute code, lead technical initiatives, review work, debug complex production issues, and provide clear direction and coaching to engineers while maintaining close involvement in the codebase.

Responsibilities

• Build and ship Next.js: write production code, review pull requests, debug difficult issues, and contribute directly to the framework and its supporting systems.
• Lead major technical initiatives: own complex projects from exploration through architecture, implementation, rollout, and production follow-through.
• Set technical direction: make architectural decisions across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, runtime behavior, and developer tooling.
• Stay close to real problems: investigate performance regressions, production failures, and developer pain points, turning insights into practical improvements.
• Raise the engineering bar: establish strong patterns for code quality, testing, performance, reliability, observability, and incremental delivery.
• Coach through the work: help engineers grow through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, technical feedback, and shared ownership of challenging problems.
• Provide focused people leadership: set clear expectations, give candid feedback, support career development, and maintain a high-trust, accountable team.
• Improve team execution: implement lightweight planning and decision-making practices that clarify ownership and reduce unnecessary coordination.
• Partner across Vercel: collaborate with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and other engineering teams to ensure framework changes integrate smoothly across the platform.
• Champion open source: work in public, engage with contributors thoughtfully, and balance community needs with product and technical priorities.
• Help grow the team: participate in recruiting, assess technical talent, and help new engineers become productive in a complex codebase.

Requirements

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with continued effectiveness as a hands-on engineer.
• Demonstrated experience leading engineers or small technical teams (team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or founder).
• Recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code; you are not looking to step away from engineering execution.
• Strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, and the systems behind a large-scale open source project, including rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
• Ability to take a complex technical problem, form a clear point of view, write critical code, and bring other engineers along.
• Know when to lead from the front and when to create space for others to take ownership.
• Experience building products or infrastructure for developers, with an understanding of quality, performance, stability, and usability expectations of that audience.
• Systems thinking to guide a team toward clean abstractions, consistent framework patterns, and scalable technical decisions.
• Comfort working through ambiguity and solving problems from first principles.
• Ability to balance speed and quality, favoring incremental delivery and real-world feedback while recognizing when deeper investment is needed for foundational infrastructure.
• Clear written communication, facilitation of productive technical debate, and decisive decision-making when a path forward is needed.
• Familiarity with using AI tools in your workflow and informed opinions about how agentic products should work for developers.
• Bonus: experience maintaining or contributing to a major open source project (especially in the React or Next.js ecosystem), experience with compilers, bundlers, caching, rendering systems, or distributed infrastructure, experience leading a small, senior engineering team while continuing to contribute individually, and familiarity with the Next.js codebase.