DaySmart supercharges experience-based businesses with innovative, industry[1]specific software services that power customer and revenue growth. With thousands of partners worldwide and dozens of industry awards, we provide best-in-class solutions to accelerate their business. TeamUp, a DaySmart product, is the most recommended management software for in-person and online classes at fitness studios, boxes, and gyms worldwide.

Position:

We're at an inflection point. Our backend team has built something special— reliable software that powers over 8,000 fitness businesses—but we need the right leader to take us from good to exceptional. This is a player/coach role for someone who leads by example, combining hands-on technical contribution with focused people leadership. You'll spend your time writing code alongside your team, making architectural decisions, and building the engineering culture that will scale us through our next phase of growth.

Responsibilities:

Technical Leadership & Hands-On Contribution (40%)

Pair programming on complex features that need architectural oversight

• Make tough technical decisions when the team needs direction

• Drive modernization from Django monolith to API-first architecture

• Debug production issues that require deep system knowledge
• Lead code reviews that teach and maintain high standards
• Plan infrastructure improvements using Python, Django, MySQL, and Kubernetes.

Team Leadership & Culture Building (40%)

• Build and mentor a high-performing team of 4-7 backend engineers
• Transform talented individual contributors into a cohesive, accountable unit
• Provide career development that engineers get excited about
• Establish engineering practices that stick without creating bureaucracy
• Run hiring processes that raise the bar for the entire team
• Create psychological safety where innovation and calculated risks are
• encouraged

Cross-Functional Partnership & Strategic Impact (20%)

• Influence product roadmap decisions with technical insight and customer
• impact data
• Partner with product managers to scope features realistically and prioritize
• technical improvements
• Advocate for engineering needs in organizational planning while
• understanding business constraints
• Work directly with customers when technical expertise is needed to solve
• complex problems
• Communicate technical concepts clearly to non-technical stakeholders

Technical Challenges:

• Scale systems handling millions of monthly bookings while maintaining 99.9% uptime
• Modernize architecture without disrupting live customer operations
• Optimize payment processing systems that move real money during peak booking periods
• Improve API performance as customer base grows 50% year-over-year
• Build observability so we prevent issues before customers notice them
• Lead adoption of AI-enhanced development practices using LLMs, agents, and GenAI tooling to accelerate team productivity and code quality

The People Challenges:

• Lead engineers through complex technical decisions while developing their judgment
• Balance feature velocity with technical excellence and system reliability
• Establish on-call practices that maintain reliability without causing burnout
• Create documentation and processes that enable rapid team scaling
• Actively coaching team members to find their growth areas and complete their goals

Qualifications

Technical Foundation

• 7+ years in software engineering with deep SaaS experience in Python and Django expertise
• 3+ years managing engineering teams, preferably in growth-stage companies
• Strong experience with SQL, database optimization, and performance tuning
• Hands-on experience with AWS services, containerization (Docker), and Kubernetes
• Solid understanding of API design, system scalability, and microservices architecture
• Experience with task queues (Celery), asynchronous programming, and background processing
• Track record of building and scaling systems that handle high transaction volumes

Leadership & Business Acumen

• Experience hiring, developing, and retaining high-performing engineers
• Proven ability to establish team processes and engineering practices that improve outcomes
• Strong communication skills with ability to influence technical and business decisions
• Experience in B2B SaaS environments, ideally with customer-facing systems
• Understanding of agile development practices and team facilitation

Preferred Experience

• Early-stage startup experience
• Multi-product SMB environment
• Payment processing systems and PCI compliance requirements
• Team Topologies concepts and modern engineering organization structures
• Experience with incident response, postmortems, and reliability engineering
• Background in fitness, wellness, or service-based industry software

Salary

The salary range for this role is $165,000 to $180,00 per year. Pay is based on several factors including but not limited to education, work experience, certifications, internal equity, etc.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary and benefits including medical, dental, vision, HSA, FSA, and more!
• 401k plan with company match on your contributions.
• Open PTO and a generous paid holiday schedule.
• Supportive work environment with the flexibility to work where/how you want – in-office, remote, or hybrid.
• Opportunities to ensure you are always learning and growing.

How You Will Work

This will be a US based position. We offer flexible work arrangements including fully remote, in person or hybrid opportunities. For those looking to work in person, we have physical offices in the following cities:

• Ann Arbor, MI
• Scottsdale, AZ
• Wayne, PA
• Austin, TX

DaySmart is committed to creating a diverse employee environment and is a proud equal opportunity employer. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, disability, age, or veteran status.

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