---
title: 'Manager of the Technical Staff - Next.js at Vercel'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/manager-of-the-technical-staff-next-js-vercel-san-francisco-dp2pkjw5m0qw'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-09-12'
---

# Manager of the Technical Staff - Next.js at Vercel

- **Company:** Vercel
- **Location:** San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-08-11
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-09-12
- **Apply:** https://job-boards.greenhouse.io/vercel/jobs/6140055004

## Job description

About Vercel:

Vercel is the agentic infrastructure company. We free people and agents to ship what’s next.

For more than a decade, Vercel has shaped how the web is built. As the team behind Next.js, v0, and AI SDK, we create products that help builders move from idea to production with speed, security, and exceptional developer experience.

Now, software is entering a new era, and the next generation of products will not just be used by people. They will be built, extended, and operated by agents.

We are building the platform for that future, trusted by companies like OpenAI, PayPal, Ramp, Supreme, and millions of developers worldwide. Whether you’re building our products, supporting our customers, growing our community, or shaping our story, you’ll help define what comes next.

## About the Role

The Next.js team builds the open source framework that powers millions of applications and shapes how developers build for the web. Our work sits at the intersection of React, framework architecture, developer experience, infrastructure, performance, and production reliability.

We are looking for an Engineering Team Lead to help build and lead a team working on Next.js. This is a hands-on player/coach role for an experienced engineer who wants to remain close to the code while helping a small team do its best work.

You will be an engineer first and a manager second. You will contribute directly to the framework, lead major technical initiatives, review code, debug complex production issues, and help make architectural decisions. You will also support the engineers around you through clear direction, thoughtful feedback, and practical coaching.

This is not a traditional people management role. You will spend the majority of your time on technical leadership and engineering execution. You should be comfortable owning difficult parts of the codebase while creating enough context and clarity for others to move quickly.

You will work closely with Product, Design, and engineers across Vercel to guide the evolution of Next.js across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, and developer tooling.

## What You Will Do

- Build and ship Next.js: Write production code, review pull requests, debug difficult issues, and contribute directly to the framework and its supporting systems.
- Lead major technical initiatives: Take ownership of complex projects from initial exploration through architecture, implementation, rollout, and production follow-through.
- Set technical direction: Make sound architectural decisions across rendering, caching, routing, build systems, runtime behavior, and developer tooling.
- Stay close to real problems: Investigate performance regressions, production failures, and developer pain points. Turn what you learn into practical improvements to the framework.
- Raise the engineering bar: Establish strong patterns for code quality, testing, performance, reliability, observability, and incremental delivery.
- Coach through the work: Help engineers grow through pairing, design reviews, code reviews, technical feedback, and shared ownership of challenging problems.
- Provide focused people leadership: Set clear expectations, give candid feedback, support career development, and help maintain a high-trust and accountable team.
- Improve team execution: Create lightweight planning and decision-making practices that clarify ownership, reduce unnecessary coordination, and help the team ship consistently.
- Partner across Vercel: Work with Product, Design, Infrastructure, Developer Experience, and other engineering teams so framework changes integrate cleanly across the Vercel platform.
- Champion open source: Work in public, engage thoughtfully with contributors, and balance community needs with the team’s product and technical priorities.
- Help grow the team: Participate in recruiting, assess technical talent, and help new engineers become productive in a complex codebase.

## About You

- You have 8+ years of software engineering experience and remain highly effective as a hands-on engineer.
- You have led engineers or small technical teams, whether as a team lead, tech lead, staff engineer, engineering manager, or founder.
- You have recent experience writing, reviewing, and shipping production code. You are not looking to step away from engineering execution.
- You have strong technical judgment across React, framework architecture, or the systems behind a large-scale open source project, including rendering, caching, routing, build tooling, and runtime behavior.
- You can take a complex technical problem, form a clear point of view, write the critical code, and bring other engineers along with you.
- You know when to lead from the front and when to create space for someone else to take ownership.
- You have experience building products or infrastructure for developers and understand the quality, performance, stability, and usability standards this audience expects.
- You think in systems and can guide a team toward clean abstractions, consistent framework patterns, and technical decisions that hold up at scale.
- You are comfortable working through ambiguity and solving problems from first principles.
- You balance speed and quality. You favor incremental delivery and real-world feedback while recognizing when foundational infrastructure requires deeper investment.
- You communicate clearly in writing, facilitate productive technical debate, and make decisions when a path forward is needed.
- You use AI tools in your own workflow and have informed opinions about how agentic products should work for developers.

Bonus

- Experience maintaining or contributing to a major open source project, particularly in the React or Next.js ecosystem.
- Experience with compilers, bundlers, caching, rendering systems, or distributed infrastructure.
- Experience leading a small, senior engineering team while continuing to make substantial individual contributions.
- Experience forming a team or technical direction from zero to one.
- Familiarity with the Next.js codebase, though this is not required.

## Benefits

- Competitive compensation package, including equity.
- Inclusive healthcare package.
- Learning and growth support, including mentorship and opportunities to attend events that build your network and skills.
- Flexible time off.
- The equipment you need to do your role, plus a work-from-home budget to outfit your space.

## Compensation

The San Francisco, CA base pay range for this role is $230,000 to $340,000. Actual salary will be based on job-related skills, experience, and location. Compensation outside San Francisco may be adjusted based on employee location.

The total compensation package may include benefits, equity-based compensation, and eligibility for a company bonus or variable pay program, depending on the role. Your recruiter can share more details during the hiring process.

## Equal Opportunity

Vercel is committed to fostering and empowering an inclusive community within our organization. We do not discriminate based on race, religion, color, gender expression or identity, sexual orientation, national origin, citizenship, age, marital status, veteran status, disability status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

Vercel encourages everyone to apply, even if they do not meet every qualification listed in the job description.

## About Vercel

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Vercel provides cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and frameworks (including Next.js) for building and deploying websites and applications.
- **Entity Type**: Private (Series F, September 2025)
- **Headquarters**: San Francisco, California, United States
- **Founded**: 2015 (as ZEIT; rebranded to Vercel in April 2020)
- **Founders**: Guillermo Rauch

## Core Business
- **Primary industries**: Edge computing, web hosting, content delivery network, developer tools
- **Target customers**: B2B – developers, engineering teams, enterprises, and startups building modern web applications
- **Mission / Purpose**: “Agentic infrastructure for every app and agent” — enabling humans and AI to build software together (from [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about))

## Products & Services
- **Next.js**: Open-source React framework for building full-stack web applications (created and maintained by Vercel).
- **Vercel Edge Network**: Global edge infrastructure for serverless compute, static hosting, and dynamic rendering.
- **v0 (AI web development tool)**: Generates front-end code from natural language prompts; winner of a 2025 Webby Award.
- **AI SDK**: Open-source library for building conversational streaming interfaces in JavaScript/TypeScript.
- **Turborepo**: Monorepo build system (acquired in Dec 2021).
- **Fluid (infrastructure model)**: Allows instances to handle multiple concurrent requests like traditional servers while retaining serverless elasticity (introduced 2025).

## Market Standing
- **Valuation**: $9.3 billion (Series F, September 2025)
- **Total Funding**: ~$652 million (Series C $102M in June 2021, $250M in May 2024 at $3.25B valuation, $300M Series F in Sep 2025)
- **Key Metric**: ~900 employees (as of 2026), growing from ~550 in 2025
- **Notable Investors & Partners**: Accel, GIC (co-led Series F); angel investors include Nat Friedman (former GitHub CEO), Jordan Walke (React creator), Naval Ravikant, and others (from [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about))
- **Growth Signals**: Rapid valuation growth ($3.25B to $9.3B in ~16 months); acquisitions of NuxtLabs (Jul 2025), Tremor (Jan 2025), Splitbee (Oct 2022); appointment of Mitchell Hashimoto (HashiCorp co-founder) to board in Mar 2026.

## Competitive Advantages
- **Next.js ecosystem dominance**: Extensive adoption; Vercel controls the most popular React framework, creating a strong lock-in for deployment.
- **Composable architecture**: MACH Alliance member; supports Git-based workflows, serverless, and edge functions.
- **AI-native product suite**: v0 and AI SDK provide unique capabilities for developer productivity and conversational UI.
- **Fast innovation cycle**: Ship-fast culture backed by high funding and strong engineering talent.

## Strategic Focus
- **Agentic infrastructure**: Building the platform where both humans and AI agents build, deploy, and scale software.
- **AI integration**: Deepening capabilities of v0, AI SDK, and AI Gateway; automated infrastructure improvements.
- **Enterprise adoption**: Appointing board members with enterprise experience; expanding sales and partner roles.
- **Fluid model**: Evolving serverless to handle stateful, long-running workloads.

## Why Work Here
- **Culture**: Engineer-driven, ship-fast ethos; 75% of Glassdoor reviewers recommend to a friend; overall rating 4.1/5.0 as of 2026 ([jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026))
- **Work model**: Remote-first (U.S. roles also in San Francisco, New York City, Austin); distributed across 54% U.S., 8% U.K., 5% Germany, etc. ([LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel))
- **Compensation**: Typical engineering range $180k–$320k (senior roles); benefits and equity are competitive (from [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026))
- **Engineering quality**: High bar for talent; known alumni go to top AI/cloud companies; strong open-source contributions (Next.js, Turborepo, AI SDK)
- **Recent departures do not diminish growth**: Despite some leadership changes (e.g., Head of Mobile left Mar 2026, Director of Commercial Sales left Apr 2026), the company continues to hire heavily (94 active postings as of mid-2026, +2.2% YoY) ([LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel))

## Sources
1. [wikipedia.org](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vercel)
2. [linkedin.com](https://www.linkedin.com/company/vercel)
3. [vercel.com/about](https://vercel.com/about)
4. [vercel.com/careers](https://vercel.com/careers)
5. [jobsbyculture.com](https://jobsbyculture.com/blog/working-at-vercel-2026)

## Other roles at Vercel

- [Senior Partner Programs Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-partner-programs-manager-vercel-san-francisco-e0x7tz244dsm) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / Austin, TX
- [Strategic Partnerships Lead](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-partnerships-lead-vercel-san-francisco-9qbj358k9zc1) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY / Austin, TX
- [IT Ops Engineer](https://feeny.ai/job/it-ops-engineer-vercel-new-york-22kdfe7x4xrc) — New York, NY
- [Software Engineering Intern - Winter '27](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-intern-winter-27-vercel-san-francisco-q60j7xfxjdxa) — San Francisco, CA
- [Software Engineering Intern - Summer '27](https://feeny.ai/job/software-engineering-intern-summer-27-vercel-san-francisco-5new1a5tksn3) — San Francisco, CA
- [FP&A Manager, Product](https://feeny.ai/job/fp-a-manager-product-vercel-san-francisco-m59r2htvk9g6) — San Francisco, CA
- [Member of the Technical Staff - Next.js](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-the-technical-staff-next-js-vercel-san-francisco-b7vkc2npb31s) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Member of the Technical Staff, Financial Data Platform](https://feeny.ai/job/member-of-the-technical-staff-financial-data-platform-vercel-san-francisco-95qp69fkvppm) — San Francisco, CA / New York, NY
- [Product Designer, Marketplace](https://feeny.ai/job/product-designer-marketplace-vercel-san-francisco-q3s3g4kzw9q4) — San Francisco, CA
- [Strategic Sourcing Manager](https://feeny.ai/job/strategic-sourcing-manager-vercel-san-francisco-ka2xnf619bhs) — San Francisco, CA