Lead Platform Engineer
About Equals 5
Equals 5 is a marketing data platform for pharma. Our clients are pharmaceutical brands and the people we reach are verified healthcare professionals.
The core product is a Laravel + Vue.js application on GCP, sitting on top of PostgreSQL and ClickHouse.
The role
You own the platform. Our product lead decides what we build and why. You decide how it is built, then build it and ship it. There is no engineering manager in between and no architecture committee to convince. You set the technical direction, you choose the tools, and you are accountable for what runs in production.
This is a hands-on engineering role, not a management one. Your leverage comes from AI coding agents and small team developers and QA.
What you will do
- Own the Equals 5 web platform end to end: Laravel API, Vue 3 SPA, PostgreSQL schema, deploys
- Take features from the first product conversation through to release: data model, API, UI, tests, rollout
- Work directly with the product lead on weekly priorities, with no ticket relay in between
- Query and shape campaign data across PostgreSQL, BigQuery and ClickHouse, and keep dashboards fast on hundreds of millions of rows
Own reliability and security: monitoring, alerting, incident response, careful handling of healthcare-professional data
How we work with AI
AI-assisted development is how we ship, not something we are piloting. Picture yourself running a small team of coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot): you hand off the mechanical work and keep your attention on architecture, data correctness and security.
That only works if you can tell when the agent is wrong. We want someone who reads generated code critically and throws it out when it deserves throwing out. Whatever ships, you are still the engineer on the hook for it.
Must have
- 5+ years full-stack, with deep Laravel (Eloquent, queues, events, service providers, testing) and Vue 3 (Composition API, Pinia, Vue Router) or similiar.
- Real SQL ability plus hands-on work with an analytical store: BigQuery, ClickHouse, Snowflake or similar
- PostgreSQL beyond CRUD: indexing, query plans, migrations against live tables
AI coding tools as part of your daily workflow, with a clear view of where they fail
Nice to have
- Ad-tech or marketing analytics background: impressions, clicks, attribution windows, audience matching
- Healthcare or pharma domain, especially consent and PII handling
- GCP at the service-design level (Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, GCS) and IaC with Pulumi or Terraform
- E2E testing with Playwright or Cypress
- TypeScript and Vite build tooling
Tech stack
PHP 8.2 / Laravel 10 · Vue 3, PostgreSQL, Redis · ClickHouse, GCP, Docker, GitHub Actions · Grafana · Claude Code
What we offer
- Fully remote with flexible hours, overlapping EU timezones for syncs
- Full technical ownership: you are in the decision, not downstream of it
- Paid AI tooling, including Claude Code
- Real data volumes and integration problems you will not find in tutorials
- A small team with no bureaucracy, where decisions happen the same day
Interview process
- Intro call, 30 min — expectations both ways
- Technical interview, 90 min — Architecture, data modeling and integration failure modes
- Culture fit interview with PM