Director of Engineering, Front-end and Ordering Platform - ezCater

ezCater is the #1 food tech platform for workplaces in the US. The company makes it easy for any organization to manage its food needs and order from over 125,000 restaurants nationwide. For workplaces, ezCater provides flexible and scalable solutions for everything from employee meal programs to one-off meetings, all backed by beyond helpful 24/7 service and business-grade reliability. For restaurant partners, ezCater helps grow their business by bringing them new high-value customers and large orders.

ezCater is a B2B marketplace for business catering. We are building a ground-up re-architecture of our platform – a headless, channel-agnostic core with AI as a cross-cutting layer. The stack is modern and intentional: Go, PostgreSQL, Kafka (MSK), Temporal, Vespa, SpiceDB, EKS. The front end is a first-class product — every API surface is designed to be consumed by multiple channels (marketplace, internal tools, partner API).

You will lead Experience Engineering at ezCater – owning the front-end platform, ordering experience, and the full customer journey from discovery through cart, checkout, and draft order submission. This is not a front-end lead role. You own the experience layer that turns a headless API platform into a product that customers use and that AI agents transact through. You will lead three teams (Discovery Experience, Ordering Experience, and Front-End Platform) and report to the VP of Engineering.

What You'll Do:

• Own front-end platform and architecture across Next.js (App Router), React, TypeScript, and Astro, including micro-frontend composition strategies, monorepo, shared design system, cross-MFE state management, and MFE shell orchestrator.
• Define the opinionated path for building and deploying front-end applications — CI/CD, observability, accessibility, performance budgets, and contract testing — across both the marketplace and internal tools channels.
• Own the full ordering experience from discovery, personalization, and menu browsing through cart, checkout, and payment, consuming headless backend APIs through BFF layers.
• Drive AI-native front-end development, including design-to-code pipelines (Figma, Claude Design, v0), AI-assisted development against organizational context, and AI-powered product experiences such as personalized recommendations, intelligent search, and conversational ordering
• Ensure front ends are machine-readable and API-first to serve AI agents alongside human users, with awareness of emerging commerce protocols (MCP, Universal Commerce Protocol)
• Own the design system as infrastructure — design tokens, theming, cross-platform consistency — packaged and documented for both human engineers and AI code generation workflows
• Lead and develop three engineering teams, scaling the organization as it grows; recruit and develop engineers and managers, including from minimal staffing
• Hold a high technical bar