Engineering Lead

About ROAR

ROAR is on a mission to empower organizations to protect their people with technology that is robust, human-centered, and easy to scale. Our duress monitoring solution combines IoT hardware (LTE gateways, BLE beacon nodes, wearables) with SaaS, mobile apps (iOS, Android), and a resilient cloud platform to deliver instant, reliable alerts in critical situations.

We’ve secured flagship enterprise customers, pivoted successfully from SMB to enterprise, and are preparing to rapidly scale into industries where safety isn’t optional—healthcare, hospitality, and beyond.

When a nurse or hotel worker presses our button, it’s your system that ensures help arrives. Few engineering jobs can say your work directly saves lives.

ROAR is scaling, and we’re looking for an Engineering Lead to help take our platform to the next level. You’ll guide a talented team of engineers [currently two direct reports, with room to grow] in building and evolving the ROAR Panic Button Solution, ensuring our system is reliable, scalable, and secure while delivering impactful features that keep people safe.

This is both a hands-on and leadership role: you’ll set the technical direction, contribute to system architecture, and mentor the team. At least 50% of your time will be spent coding and directly contributing to the product, especially early on as you learn the system and shape its future.

This is a chance to step in as a player-coach at a pivotal inflection point: you’ll be hands-on in the code, but also shaping the roadmap, the team, and the engineering culture that will take ROAR through its next stage of growth.

• Mission With Meaning: Build technology that directly protects people’s lives.
• Market Inflection Point: Workplace safety is now a compliance requirement and a board-level issue. ROAR is positioned to lead.
• Career-Defining Impact: Set technical direction, scale a team, and shape the engineering culture at a company on the verge of breakout growth.
• Upside: With Series A on the horizon, you’ll grow alongside a company with a clear 3–5 year path to scale and exit.

• Architect & Scale Systems – Own the evolution of ROAR’s technical architecture with a focus on scalability, reliability, and maintainability with particular emphasis on system reliability and observability.
• Hands-on Engineering – Translate requirements into production-ready solutions and contribute code when needed.
• Tech Leadership – Drive best practices in code quality, testing, security, and DevOps; ensure system robustness in safety-critical environments.
• Team Leadership – Mentor and guide engineers, provide constructive feedback, and help shape a high-performing culture while growing into broader leadership responsibilities as the company scales.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration – Work closely with our Director of Product, VP of Hardware, and Operations teams to align engineering with business and user needs.
• Drive Velocity – Identify bottlenecks in delivery and implement processes that enable rapid, high-quality releases that directly impact revenue growth.
• Enterprise-Readiness – Lead initiatives around compliance (HIPAA, SOC 2), vendor management, monitoring, and fault tolerance to meet enterprise customer requirements.
• Innovation & Continuous Improvement – Explore new technologies, improve existing processes, and advocate for technical excellence across the stack.

• 8+ years of experience developing and shipping production software, including 2+ years in a technical leadership role (lead engineer, tech lead or equivalent).
• Strong background in system architecture and distributed systems design.
• 2+ years with Elixir in production systems.
• Experience with hardware/software integration, serial protocols, and device communication (e.g., Wi-Fi, BLE, cellular).
• Solid understanding of distributed systems, real-time constraints, and fault-tolerant architectures.
• Experience building and maintaining APIs (GraphQL and/or REST).
• Proven track record of designing frameworks and components for code reuse and scalability.
• Experience automating secure, reliable processes in DevOps/Cloud environments with working knowledge of AWS, though day-to-day focus will remain on embedded and application software rather than cloud infrastructure.
• Excellent problem-solving, communication, and collaboration skills.
• Ability to work independently while fostering team collaboration.

• Core: Elixir, Erlang, Phoenix/LiveView
• IoT/Embedded: Nerves, MQTT
• Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS, Docker, Terraform
• Other: GraphQL, REST APIs, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/alerting tools

• Experience with safety-critical or IoT systems
• Familiarity with hardware/software integration
• Experience managing security processes and evaluations
• Prior success scaling a platform during rapid company growth and evolving an engineering team from a small, player-coach model to a larger structure

• Stabilize and scale the platform to meet growing enterprise demand.
• Deliver major features that enable enterprise rollouts (e.g., OTA updates, monitoring dashboards, compliance features).
• Establish engineering best practices and improve team velocity.
• Build trust with executive leadership, board stakeholders, and enterprise customers as a technical leader who delivers.

• Competitive compensation, equity, and benefits.
• Hybrid/Remote flexibility (Philadelphia HQ + remote).
• Leadership visibility and a seat at the table during a pivotal growth stage.
• The chance to build an engineering organization from the ground up.