Full Stack Tech Lead - PHP/Laravel

• 5+ years building and running production systems as a full-stack engineer — genuinely comfortable in both Laravel and React, not strong in one and passable in the other
• Strong PHP/Laravel, or strong equivalent experience in another modern backend framework with a real willingness to work in Laravel
• Hands-on AWS ownership — ECS, Aurora/RDS, and the operational side: monitoring, incident response, and cost optimization. Not "I've used AWS," but "I've been the person who gets called when it breaks and the person who noticed the bill was too high."
• Experience with asynchronous job processing: queues, workers, retries, idempotency, dead-letter handling
• Production experience with the OpenAI API — completions, structured outputs, vector stores — including handling non-deterministic output and controlling token cost at scale
• Fluent with AI-assisted development. We use Claude Code daily, and we expect you to work the same way: not just chat prompts, but planning, review, and repo-level context. You should be able to raise the team's ceiling here, not just keep up.
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers, formally or informally
• Fluent English (speaking)

• SOC 2 or similar compliance experience
• ATS, HR tech, or recruiting domain knowledge
• Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation, Terraform, CDK)
• Experience building or integrating MCP servers or agentic workflows

• Owns outcomes, not tickets. The most valuable work anyone has done in this role wasn't assigned to them. If you need a fully specified backlog to be effective, this isn't the right fit.
• Thinks about the product, not just the implementation. Understands why we're building something and pushes back when the "why" doesn't hold up.
• Explains trade-offs clearly. Can say why one approach was chosen over another and what the long-term cost of that choice is.
• Comfortable being the most senior person on a problem. The team is small. There often isn't someone above you to escalate to.
• Uses AI with judgment. Knows when to reach for it and when not to, and owns whatever ships regardless of what wrote it.
• Coaches instead of blames. When something breaks, the first question is what made it possible, not who did it.

Distro is a product company. You'd be building and owning what we ship, not staffing someone else's roadmap.