Engineering Lead: Hands-On, AI-First

About the role

SPICE is building a platform for premium dining that connects diners with experiences and helps restaurants grow their loyalty and reach. This is a zero-to-one engineering leadership position based in Amman, where you will own the technical foundation: the architecture, the core systems and the engineering culture. You will work across Product, Design and QA, from product discovery to production ship.

Key responsibilities

• Design and own the entire backend and platform architecture
• Take part in product discovery and shape what gets built
• Build core product features end-to-end: backend, APIs and web
• Ship API-first, event-driven systems that scale with the business
• Work directly with founders to turn product thinking into production systems
• Use AI tooling (Cursor, Claude, Copilot) as a core part of how you build
• Hire and grow a team of 3-4 engineers once the foundation is solid
• Own the SDLC: code reviews, quality standards and site reliability

Required profile

• 7+ years of hands-on software engineering experience
• Management experience leading or mentoring a small engineering team (1-2 years)
• Experience building foundational systems at an early-stage product or startup
• Experience building payment systems: wallets, ledgers and transactions
• Genuine daily use of AI tools to move faster

Required skills

• Full-stack: backend architecture and frontend code when needed
• API-first thinking, with clean, documented systems
• Tech stack: Node.js, TypeScript, NestJS, React, AWS, PostgreSQL, event-driven architecture
• Familiarity with search engines such as Elasticsearch or Typesense
• Experience with AI agent frameworks such as LangChain is a plus