• Define and own the end-to-end architecture for the Ignite application, ensuring cohesion across features, services, and user experiences. • Establish architectural principles and guardrails that support experimentation while maintaining long-term maintainability. • Evaluate and select frameworks, patterns, and tooling with a strategic lens—balancing speed, cost, scalability, and talent availability. • Lead, mentor, and grow the engineering team; provide technical direction, unblock developers, and ensure engineering excellence. • Stay current with AI development and ensure the team uses best practices. • Conduct code reviews, pair-programming sessions, and technical deep dives to elevate quality and consistency across the team. • Work closely with contractors and full-time engineers to align on standards, deliverables, and sprint goals. • Translate product requirements into clear technical plans with risks, assumptions, and sequencing. • Own and continuously improve the developer experience: tooling, CI/CD, environments, local setup, testing strategy, and automation. • Reduce friction in the development process through better libraries, documentation, templates, scaffolding, and reusable components. • Increase engineering throughput by identifying bottlenecks and eliminating unnecessary complexity. • Implement and maintain system observability—logs, metrics, alerting—for fast diagnosis and reliable operations. • Collaborate with product, design, and marketing to turn ambiguous concepts into clear technical solutions. • Lead technical discovery for new features, identify dependencies, and propose simplified solutions where appropriate. • Ensure that system performance, reliability, and scalability underpin all new product work. • Bring a strong experimentation mindset that enables the team to ship, test, measure, and iterate quickly. • Partner with AI engineers to design and integrate LLM-powered features (chat, personalization, agents, internal automations). • Ensure architectural readiness for AI-driven workflows, data pipelines, and real-time interactions. • Represent engineering in strategic discussions, shaping roadmaps and making trade-offs visible to stakeholders. • Communicate clearly upward and across teams—technical decisions, risks, timelines, and opportunities.