Staff Software Engineer

Lori Vision Studio is building WowNow, a connected consumer-creation platform spanning consumer-facing WebApp/App experiences, internal Admin operations, backend services, and integrations with physical production devices. We are hiring a hands-on Staff Software Engineer / Technical Lead to establish technical ownership of our U.S. software platform and help a growing engineering team deliver reliable, maintainable products.

Our immediate challenge is to stabilize and incrementally modernize inherited codebases while continuing to ship business-critical features. This is a senior individual-contributor technical leadership role with meaningful architectural decision authority—not a purely advisory architect role, a people-management position, or a product-management role.

Architecture, Legacy Modernization & Technical Decision-Making

• Conduct a hands-on audit of existing frontend, backend, database, infrastructure, and deployment architecture; identify security, reliability, scalability, and maintainability risks and deliver a prioritized remediation roadmap.
• Lead stabilization and incremental modernization of inherited legacy codebases; define module boundaries, service responsibilities, API contracts, data flows, and architecture decision records while avoiding unnecessary rewrites.
• Serve as the primary technical decision-maker for the U.S. software platform; lead design reviews, approve critical architectural changes, set engineering standards, and elevate unacceptable release risks.
• Evaluate build-versus-buy, refactoring, migration, and technical-debt tradeoffs against delivery capacity and business impact.

Hands-on Engineering, Code Quality & Mentorship

• Personally inspect, debug, refactor, and contribute production code across React/TypeScript applications and backend services; lead by example in complex problem-solving.
• Establish actionable coding standards, peer-review practices, branch protection, automated checks, and risk-based approval requirements without becoming the bottleneck for every pull request.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, constructive code review, technical documentation, and clear design feedback; improve the team’s ability to work independently.

Backend Architecture & Cross-System Reliability

• Design and review production backend services, APIs, relational data models, transactions, concurrency, authentication/authorization, and secure data access.
• Strengthen critical order, payment, user-account, Admin, asynchronous-job, and event-driven workflows with idempotency, retry handling, observability, and failure recovery.
• Own technical contracts and integration quality between U.S. WebApp/Admin/backend systems and China-based TimeForge device R&D; establish joint integration-test expectations.

Engineering Delivery, Quality & Production Operations

• Take technical ownership of engineering delivery: realistic implementation planning, clear technical task ownership, effective reviews, and predictable production-ready releases in partnership with Product and QA.
• Improve CI/CD, testability, environment consistency, monitoring, incident response, feature flags or staged releases, rollback readiness, and secure deployment practices.
• Lead root-cause analysis and corrective actions for critical production incidents; build preventive controls and track recurring failure patterns.
• Partner with QA to establish risk-based unit, integration, API, end-to-end, regression, and release-acceptance coverage for critical customer and operational journeys.

Cross-functional Leadership

• Work with Product Managers to clarify user journeys, business rules, edge cases, acceptance criteria, technical dependencies, and delivery tradeoffs; collaborate with UI/UX on implementation quality.
• Communicate architectural decisions, technical risks, remediation priorities, and delivery status clearly to U.S. leadership and distributed teams.
• Typically 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, or equivalent demonstrated depth, with technical ownership of multiple production systems or substantial platforms.
• Strong hands-on backend engineering experience with Go, Node.js, Java, or comparable server-side technologies, including relational databases, transactions, API design, asynchronous workflows, and distributed failure handling.
• Proven experience auditing or modernizing inherited or legacy systems, making pragmatic refactoring decisions, and improving code quality while continuing business delivery.
• Demonstrated architectural decision-making, substantial code review, technical mentorship, production troubleshooting, and incident root-cause analysis.
• Practical experience with automated testing, CI/CD, secure development, observability, and safe production rele