# Lead Engineer at Raft

- Company: Raft
- What the company does: Raft brings the power of AI and logistics together to help freight forwarders and customs brokers automate workflows, cut costs, and scale efficiently. Backed by Bessemer.
- Company website: https://www.raft.ai/
- Type: Startups (AI role)
- Level: Senior
- Location: Remote; McLean, VA; Colorado Springs, CO; Tacoma, WA; Oahu, HI; Tampa, FL; Boston, MA
- Work setup: Remote
- Posted: 2026-05-27
- Apply by: 2026-10-08
- Apply: https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/raft/jobs/6007073004
- Page: https://www.1752.vc/careers/jobs/raft-lead-engineer/

## About the role

As Lead Engineer for [R]AIMS, you will serve as a senior technical leader responsible for evolving the architecture, execution, and engineering rigor of Raft’s AI Mission System. You will be hands-on in the codebase, leading by doing, while also setting technical direction and raising the quality of engineering across the team.

## What they're looking for

- 6+ years of hands-on experience building and shipping production software systems across the full stack (frontend, backend, infrastructure, and ML)
- Deep software engineering fundamentals with demonstrated ability to design, build, and evolve complex systems that perform reliably at scale
- Exceptional technical communication skills, able to lead through influence across engineering, product, and leadership stakeholders without requiring direct authority
- Proven experience designing and evolving distributed systems, including service decomposition, inter-service communication patterns, fault tolerance, and observability
- Strong hands-on experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native platform architecture in production environments
- Experience building data-intensive or AI-enabled production systems with real operational users and real performance constraints

Tags: Engineering