Lead Engineer, AI-Driven Product Development

About Local Vacation Rentals

LocalVR 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. Now we’re doing something bold: we’ve torn out our legacy tech stack and rebuilt it from scratch using AI-first development with Claude Code. Not incrementally. All of it. 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.

The Role

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.

You’ll work within a tight, high-output team:

• 1 Senior Backend Engineer — your counterpart on deep backend and data work
• 1 Product Owner / Designer — who 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 — who sets product direction and works directly with you on technical strategy

Your job is to be the technical center of gravity: making sure 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.

Product-Minded Engineering: 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

Rapid Building, Prototyping & Shipping: We deploy value daily, not quarterly. You’re comfortable going from idea to production in hours, not sprints. 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

DevOps & Platform Ownership: You own the full deployment pipeline and production health of every application.

• Manage infrastructure across Vercel, Supabase, Cloudflare, and GitHub 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

The Stack: You’ll own four production applications:

• LocalVR 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, TypeScript, and Tailwind CSS on the frontend, Supabase for database and auth, and Vercel for hosting and deployments. Infrastructure runs through GitHub Actions, Sentry, and Cloudflare. Claude Code (CLI + VS Code) and the Anthropic API are embedded throughout our development and product workflows.

What This Role Is Not

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. And 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.

Why LocalVR

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.