Job description:
Remote (US hours required) | Full-time or Contract
Marketech is a boutique email marketing agency serving mid-market DTC brands ($10–100M in revenue) on Shopify and Klaviyo. ~15 people across strategy, copy, design, and operations.
We're investing heavily in the Claude Code ecosystem to power vibe marketing — AI agents handle most of the execution; humans direct context, strategy, and quality. Our monorepo of skills, agents, and workflows is the canonical operational system behind that bet. The repo is new, the investment is significant, and the architectural decisions made over the next 12 months will shape how we operate for years.
This role owns the engineering and architecture of that system.
The Role
You'll lead engineering for our internal tools and AI infrastructure. You own how the system gets built: when to use n8n versus when to deploy our own service, how to design Python pipelines that scale past spreadsheets into a real data lake, how to choose between managed services and self-hosted infrastructure, and how the agent monorepo evolves architecturally as we grow from ~50 skills today into the operating system for the whole company.
Product direction — the "what to build" — is owned by the company's leadership and operations team. They know what we're trying to accomplish and what work needs to flow through the system. Your job is the "how": turning their direction into well-scoped engineering work, executing on the architecture, and making sure today's solutions don't become tomorrow's tech debt.
You're senior enough to push back when a stated request points at the wrong technical solution, and to design a better one. You're hands-on enough to build alongside your team every day.
The four things that matter most
1. Architectural judgment. When we hit a real problem — "we need this Google Sheet to update across 10 client accounts" — you decide whether the answer is a Make scenario, an n8n workflow, a Python script in our monorepo, a managed service, or a self-hosted database. You defend the decision on TCO, scalability, observability, and team capability, not just technical elegance.
2. System-level engineering. You design for the system, not the request. Single-purpose scripts that solve one ticket but don't compose with the rest of the stack are a liability. Your work creates capability for everything we build next.
3. Build/buy/skip judgment. Knowing when to ship the boring buy, when to build the differentiator, and when to refuse to solve a problem that shouldn't exist in this form.
4. Coaching engineers and contributors to ship right. Two direct reports and a semi-managed contributor today. Your job is to make them faster and safer through process, code review, and architectural standards — not to do their work.
What you'll own
- The Marketech monorepo — our canonical operational system, built on the Claude Code stack. Currently ~50 agent skills and ~13 agents driving our vibe marketing operations and data analytics. You own the engineering architecture: how skills compose, how agents call them, how data flows through, and where the system fails gracefully.
- The Chief Bot Officer — a Slack bot that answers operational questions for the team. Currently on Python/Flask; planned migration to a managed agent architecture (essentially a Slack UI on the Marketech monorepo). You own the migration design.
- The n8n orchestration layer — workflows connecting Klaviyo, Monday.com, Google Workspace, Slack, and client tooling. You decide what stays in n8n versus what graduates into the monorepo as proper code.
- The data layer — our Google Sheets, Klaviyo exports, Shopify data, and operational reports today live in disparate places. You decide what a real data foundation looks like — managed warehouse, self-hosted, or composite — and bring it into being.
- The roadmap — what gets built next, by whom, and why. Co-owned with company leadership; they bring the product priorities, you bring the engineering plan.
- The team — 2 direct reports and 1 semi-managed contributor today, with room to grow. Your job is to scale them through process and coaching, not to do their work.
What you'll do day-to-day
- Translate ambiguous business asks ("we need to know AOV by segment across all clients") into scoped engineering work — data model, integrations, observability, error paths.
- Decide what we build, what we buy, what we self-host, and what we skip. Defend with reasoning.
- Architect at the system level — push back when a proposed approach won't scale, won't compose, or creates tech debt you'll be paying down in six months.
- Coach your reports through scoping, code review, prioritization, and communication.
- Build alongside your team, every day. You'll ship Python services, n8n workflows, agent skills, and infrastructure changes yourself. This isn't a pure management role. Your daily output sets the engineering standard contributors learn from.
What we're looking for
- 5+ years of software engineering experience building and operating systems in production. Internships and student work do not count toward this minimum.
- Real architectural chops. You've made build/buy/host-it-yourself decisions for production systems, and you can talk through the tradeoffs concretely.
- Production engineering credentials. You've deployed services, designed pipelines, instrumented observability, and operated something that mattered. "Vibe-coded one app" is not what we're after.
- Comfortable across the stack — Python + JavaScript/TypeScript, APIs, databases, queues, message buses, cloud services.
- Hands-on with the agent ecosystem — Claude Code, MCP, agent skills, workflow automation platforms (especially n8n). You're not just a consumer; you build with these.
- Experience evaluating build vs. buy through a business lens. Cost, ROI, maintainability count as much as technical elegance.
- Comfortable translating ambiguous requests into scoped engineering work — separating stated wants from underlying technical needs.
- Self-directed and execution-focused. This is a senior remote role with real ownership.
Bonus points
- Engineering management or technical lead experience — you've coached engineers, set code review standards, designed sprint and intake processes.
- Experience building AI-enabled workflows or internal tools at scale.
- Background in martech, e-commerce, agency, or DTC environments.
- Familiarity with the Shopify / Klaviyo ecosystem.
- Distributed team experience.
- Data engineering background — warehousing, pipelines, dbt-style modeling.
None of these are required. If you think you're a strong fit for the role, apply — even if you have few or none of these. We weigh how you think and what you've built over what's on your resume.
Why this role
Internal automation and AI infrastructure is the #1 long-term strategic priority for our services business. It's what lets us deliver better work to clients with a leaner team — and it's the foundation we're building the next chapter of the company on.
You'd be the senior engineering owner of that initiative, reporting directly to the owner. Every person at Marketech benefits directly from your work — the long-term goal is for everyone in the company to use Claude Code as their daily interface for the work they do.
Over time, this role can expand to engineering ownership across other Marketech initiatives, including our Restore.ai product.
Logistics
- Remote, hiring globally
- US working hours required — your choice of Eastern, Central, or Pacific. Wherever you live, you keep US hours.
Benefits:
Application Question(s):
- What automation or AI tools are you actively building with right now? (Be specific)
- Why this role?
- This is a contract role. What monthly salary or hourly rate are you looking for?
- Describe your background in software engineering, system architecture, and automation.
- Walk us through a system architecture decision you've made. When did you choose to buy a SaaS vs. deploy your own service, or design a scalable pipeline from scratch? What did you decide and why?
Work Location: Remote
