Lead Engineer, AI-Driven Product Development

Overview

Local

VR manages over 550 luxury vacation rentals across Breckenridge, Park City, Lake Tahoe, Telluride, and Florida’s 30A. We’ve spent a decade building something different in the vacation rental industry: local expertise, obsessive service standards, and technology that actually works for our teams on the ground. We’re rebuilding our tech stack with AI-first development using Claude Code and we’re mostly done.

We need an engineer who doesn’t just write code, but thinks like a product owner, ships like a founder, and runs infrastructure like an SRE. Someone who treats AI as their primary development tool, not a novelty.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You’ll own the architecture, reliability, and forward momentum of our entire product ecosystem: four production applications serving property owners, guests, and internal operations teams.

• 1 Senior Backend Engineer — your counterpart on deep backend and data work
• 1 Product Owner / Designer — drives product development and prioritization alongside deploying their own contributions to the product
• 3 Stakeholder-Builders — department directors who are in the CI/CD pipeline deploying their own features and internal tools
• CPO — sets product direction and works directly with you on technical strategy

Your job is to be the technical center of gravity: ensuring what everyone builds is secure, coherent, performant, and actually ships. You’re the person who architects the system, sets the standards, unblocks the team, and fixes what breaks.

You don’t wait for a spec, you think in user problems, business outcomes, and first principles. You have opinions about what to build, not just how to build it.

• Translate business problems into technical solutions without waiting for detailed requirements
• Own the feedback loop: ship, measure, learn, iterate
• Think in systems across the full portfolio, not just the feature in front of you

We deploy value daily, not quarterly. Claude Code is your primary development environment.

• Build and ship iteratively, meaningful PRs every day, not big-bang releases
• Prototype fast: validate ideas with working software before investing in polish
• Review and harden code built by non-engineers on the team, make it production-grade without slowing them down
• Use Claude Code (CLI + VS Code) as your primary workflow, AI-assisted development isn’t supplementary, it’s how we work

You own the full deployment pipeline and production health of every application.

• Manage infrastructure across Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, and Git Hub Actions
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines that stakeholder-builders can safely deploy through
• Implement end-to-end testing, error monitoring (Sentry), and alerting that catches issues before users do
• Own security, data integrity, and access control across all environments
• Maintain cost awareness, keep infrastructure lean and efficient as the platform scales

You’ll own four production applications:

• Local
  
  VR OS (our custom-built CRM replacing Salesforce)
• Admin Tool (Django/Python)
• a customer-facing Booking Engine for direct reservations
• and an Owner Portal for our clients to manage their property.

The primary stack is Next.js, Type Script, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend, Supabase for database and auth, and Vercel for hosting and deployments. Infrastructure runs through Git Hub Actions, Sentry, and Cloudflare. Claude Code (CLI + VS Code) and the Anthropic API are embedded throughout our development and product workflows.

This is not a role for someone who needs a large engineering team to be effective. It’s not for someone who’s skeptical of AI tools and planning to quietly work around them. It’s not for someone who only wants to build greenfield features — a significant part of this job is keeping production systems healthy, secure, and performant while enabling others to ship.

We’re a profitable, growing company with a clear service that people love. We have a 4.9-star Glassdoor rating and a team that’s genuinely excited about where we’re headed. We’re not a startup burning cash on a hypothesis. We manage real properties in real destinations and we’ve been doing it for over a decade. We’re at an inflection point. The technology we’re building right now will define how this company operates for years.

The person who takes this role will have shaped it.