Area Lead
TL;DR Most area lead roles ask you to trade the craft for the title. This one doesn’t. We’re hiring area leads who run organizations of 30+ and still know what their strongest engineers are working on this week. You’ll think end-to-end about the business, lead a workforce of humans and AI agents that’s rewriting what an engineering org even looks like, and stay close enough to the code to drop in as a tech lead when a problem demands it.
Why Lovable?
Lovable is the software creation platform that gives people the power to act on the problems closest to them. For decades, turning an idea into software required so much capital, technical fluency, and time that many ideas never came to life. Lovable is the counterargument: a platform for all people with ideas, ambition, and problems worth solving. From solopreneurs to small business owners to teams at companies like Adidas and Zendesk, people have built over 60 million projects on Lovable since its launch in November 2024. And we’re just getting started.
We’re building a generational company from Stockholm, with growing teams in London, Boston, New York, and San Francisco. Our team is small, talent-dense, and moving quickly, with a culture rooted in extreme ownership, high velocity, and low-ego collaboration. We look for people who care deeply, ship fast, and are eager to make a dent in the world.
Lovable is one of TIME’s 100 Most Influential Companies and has been recognized on the Forbes AI 50 and CNBC Disruptor 50, reflecting our momentum as one of Europe’s fastest-growing AI companies and one of the most ambitious places to build in this next era of software.
What this role is and what it isn’t
It is a senior are lead role with scope. You’ll run an organization that spans product, platform, and applied AI - with other managers, senior engineers, and AI agents reporting in - and you’ll be accountable for what that organization ships, how it operates, and the business outcomes it drives.
It is still close enough to the work that you can drop into a Tech Lead role on a hard problem when the situation demands it. We don’t measure leadership IC time as a percentage. We measure it as the ability to pick up the work and ship at the bar you’re asking of your team.
It isn’t a role for managers who think of themselves as engineering-adjacent. You need to be credible in code, design, and on-call - and you need to want to be.
It isn’t a role for leaders who only think about engineering. We expect you to reason end-to-end about the business - economics, product, GTM, customers - and to make calls that are best for the company, not just best for your team.
What we’re looking for
15+ years of engineering experience, including 6+ years of people management at a pre-IPO startup, scale-up or frontier tech company, and at least 2 years of managing managers. Strong IC track record before management.
You’ve run an engineering organization of 30+ with managers and senior engineers reporting in. You can speak concretely about how you structured the org, how you hired up to that scale, and what you’d do differently.
Still hands-on at the Tech Lead level: you can pick up an unfamiliar codebase, design and ship a non-trivial change, run an incident, and review code at a high bar. You haven’t let your engineering muscle atrophy.
You’ve thought hard about humans and AI agents on the same team. What humans should and shouldn’t delegate. How productivity gets measured when the unit of work is shifting. Strong opinions, lightly held.
Comfortable navigating ambiguity and driving clarity at an organisational level, not just technically. You write the doc that aligns three teams instead of waiting for someone else to.
Deep technical credibility in at least one area - full-stack product (React/TypeScript + Go/Rust), platform and developer experience (Kubernetes, sandboxing, observability, CI/CD, application frameworks), or applied AI (training, evals, agent systems, model serving).
Cross-functional to your core and business-fluent: you work seamlessly across design, product, and go-to-market, and know how to bring people along with you; andable to reason end-to-end about unit economics, product strategy, GTM, and customer outcomes
Track record of building and growing teams: you’ve hired senior engineers others wanted to work with, grown managers under you who became great in their own right, and set up career growth and performance practices that didn’t require constant maintenance. People follow you between companies.
Based in Stockholm or London or ready to relocate - this is an on-site, 5-days-a-week role.
What you’ll do
In one sentence: Run the engineering organization that builds Lovable - humans and agents both - and stay close enough to the work to be the senior engineer in the room when it matters.
Lead engineering. Product, platform, and applied AI under one roof. Own the roadmap and the business outcomes the org is on the hook for.
Set technical direction across the org: drive the design docs and architectural decisions that span teams, push back hard on weak plans (including your own), and hold a high bar for what ships.
Shape engineering culture: how we ship, how we write code, how we hire, how we deploy agents. Set norms that outlast any single project.
Ship fast: at Lovable the question is always “how fast can we get this to users?” You bias toward production and pull research, prototypes, and experiments into reality on the order of days and weeks, not quarters.
Build the operating model for an engineering org where humans and AI agents work side by side. We’re inventing this in public, and you’ll set the patterns the rest of the company learns from.
Operate as a peer to the executive team. Own outcomes that span beyond engineering, make the company’s biggest calls alongside the rest of leadership, and translate them back into engineering work that matters.
Our tech stack
We’re building with tools that both humans and AI love:
Frontend: React, TypeScript
Backend: Go and Rust
Cloud: Cloudflare, GCP, AWS, many LLM providers
Data: ClickHouse, Firestore, Spanner, BigQuery
DevOps & tooling: Kubernetes, gVisor-based sandboxing for agentic workloads, GitHub Actions, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Terraform
Local tooling: Nix, DevEnv
And always on the lookout for what’s next.
About your application
Please submit your application in English - it’s our company language, so you’ll be speaking lots of it if you join.
We treat all candidates equally - if you’re interested, please apply through our careers portal.
Ready to join us?
Help us unlock human creativity and build the future of software creation.