[Prolong] Director of Engineering

Description

About Prolong

At Prolong, we believe post-purchase will become one of the most strategic layers of retail.

Repairs, returns, warranties, maintenance and customer care are no longer operational back-office processes. They are becoming major drivers of customer loyalty, profitability and sustainability.

That’s why we’re building Prolong.

A configurable operating system allowing the world’s largest retailers to orchestrate every aspect of their post-purchase operations.

Over the last two years, we’ve built the foundations.

Today, we’re reaching product-market fit with demanding enterprise customers across luxury, fashion and premium retail.

The next challenge is very different. It’s no longer about proving the product. It’s about building a platform capable of supporting hundreds of enterprise customers without becoming exponentially more complex.

Why this role exists

Every new customer brings:

• new business models
• new repair organizations
• new workflows
• new countries
• new legal constraints
• new integrations
• new logistics partners
• new warranty policies

Our ambition isn’t to build custom software for each of them. Our ambition is to build one platform capable of elegantly modelling all of them.

And that’s why we’re hiring this role.

Your mission

Your mission is to make sure Prolong scales without losing what makes it exceptional today. As our customers grow more complex, our platform shouldn’t.

Your challenge is building a platform that scales faster than customer complexity.

To get there, you’ll continuously balance two dimensions:

• Scaling the platform so every new customer, country or business model strengthens the product instead of making it more complex.
• Transforming how we build software by making AI a natural part of both our engineering practices and the product itself.

One question should guide almost every technical decision you make:

How do we absorb more customer complexity without making the platform more complex?

Every architectural decision should make Prolong:

• simpler to understand
• easier to configure
• easier to implement
• easier to maintain
• more scalable over time

The goal isn’t to build more features. It’s to build software that becomes stronger every time we solve a new customer problem.

Your role

1.The platform

Our ambition is simple: every new customer, integration or country should make the platform stronger.

You’ll continuously evolve our architecture so every new customer strengthens the platform instead of fragmenting it.

You’ll probably enjoy this role if you are:

• Someone obsessed with abstraction.
• Someone who naturally sees patterns before exceptions.
• Someone who enjoys domain modelling as much as software engineering.

2.AI-native Engineering

We expect AI to fundamentally change how engineers design, build, review and maintain software. We believe it’s changing what software engineering looks like. You will drive:

• how engineers work with AI
• how software is designed
• where agents replace repetitive work
• how engineering productivity evolves

3.Engineering culture

You’ll inherit a strong engineering team. This team built the foundations of Prolong.

Now it needs someone capable of helping it enter the next chapter:

• Someone engineers trust because he still builds.
• Someone who still embodies the mindset of an architect and hands-on builder, able to challenge the toughest technical decisions.
• Someone engineers naturally want to follow, capable of inspiring, coaching and bringing everyone along in this transformation
• Someone capable of explaining not only how AI changes engineering but why it’s an opportunity to become better engineers.

4.Platform scalability

The biggest risk for Prolong isn’t moving too slowly. It’s solving customer problems in ways that gradually turn us into another SAP.

Your role is to continuously challenge the architecture, domain model and product design so we can stay incredibly close to customer needs without accumulating unnecessary complexity.

But building the next generation of Prolong also means preparing the platform for enterprise scale.

Over the next years you’ll lead subjects such as

• increasing reliability and resilience (enterprise architecture, observability)
• strengthening security and compliance (including ISO 27001, GDPR)
• building a truly global infrastructure (multi-region, internationalization and China readiness)
• Designing a modular platform to offer the upsell strategy needed for our market
• turning integrations into a strategic product capability through a robust API, MCP support and a thriving ecosystem
• Co-building together with the AI Engineer a robust and scalable AI infrastructure

5. Product partnership

At Prolong, Product and Engineering are deeply connected. Technology decisions shape product capabilities. Product decisions shape architecture. We’re looking for someone:

• who enjoys thinking across both worlds
• who loves working extremely close with Product and challenging product assumptions
• who enjoys exploring innovation in a commando way

Together, we’ll relentlessly simplify every solution until only what truly matters remains.

For our most strategic bets, you’ll help lead AI-powered innovation commandos: small, highly autonomous teams using AI and fast iterations to explore new opportunities, validate markets in days instead of months, and turn promising prototypes into products ready for industrialization.

6.Our stack

Frontend: React, Typescript

Backend: NestJS, Typescript, Prisma, PostgreSQL

Infrastructure: GCP, Terraform, Github Actions

Profile

A builder:

We’re looking for someone who enjoys understanding how businesses work just as much as writing code.

Someone who gets excited by modelling complex organisations, identifying hidden patterns and transforming messy real-world operations into elegant, configurable systems.

For you, technology isn’t the end goal. It’s the tool that allows great products to exist.

You probably spend as much time thinking about domain models, abstractions and product design as you do thinking about code.

If you’ve ever looked at a complex business process and instinctively started imagining how it could become a clean, configurable platform, you’ll probably enjoy working at Prolong.

The mindset we are looking for:

• You enjoy solving difficult problems more than shipping easy features.
• You naturally search for patterns before exceptions.
• You enjoy modelling businesses as much as writing software.
• You believe the best architecture is the one customers never notice.
• You still enjoy opening your IDE and building things yourself.
• You like mentoring engineers, sharing ideas and raising the technical bar around you.
• You move comfortably between architecture discussions, product strategy and customer conversations.
• You see AI as an opportunity to fundamentally rethink how software is designed and built—not simply as another productivity tool.

Your profile:

• You have significant experience building complex software products and have led technical decisions on systems that needed to evolve over time.
• You’ve managed engineers or technical teams and know how to combine technical leadership with hands-on execution.
• You’re comfortable partnering closely with Product and discussing business problems before discussing technical solutions.
• You know how to simplify complexity instead of adding to it.
• You’re comfortable leveraging AI throughout the software development lifecycle while maintaining a high quality bar.
• You’re the kind of person engineers naturally turn to when facing difficult technical decisions.
• Ideally, you’ve already experienced the journey from an ambitious startup to a scaling SaaS company.

In terms of organization

• You will be managed by the Chief Product Officer (CPO)
• You’ll be one of the company’s senior leaders.
• You will manage 4 developers among one squad, and one more squad to come
• You will collaborate closely with the Senior Forward-Deployed Software Engineer and the COO

In 18 months, you’ll know you’ve succeeded if…

• Our largest enterprise customers push the limits of our platform without pushing the limits of our architecture.
• Engineers spend more time solving hard problems than writing repetitive code.
• New customers make the product stronger instead of more complex.
• Product and Engineering feel like a single team solving the same problems.
• The platform is ready to support our international ambitions without major architectural redesign.
• AI has become a natural part of how Engineering works, not a side project.
• Our engineering culture becomes one of the reasons people join Prolong.
• Looking back, we realize we didn’t just scale the engineering team, we fundamentally changed how software is built at Prolong.

Recruitment process

We believe in keeping our process clear, respectful of your time, and focused on real collaboration.

• Screening Call (30 min) with Sarah : A quick conversation to align on mutual expectations, your motivations, and the fit with the role and team culture.
• Technical interview
• Interview with CPO
• Team & external advisors touchpoint : You will meet at least one of other founders (CEO, COO) and team members to get a better sense of the Prolong vibe.
• Reference calls
• Meet us physically in Paris

We move fast and give feedback at each step. Our goal is for you to leave the process with clarity whether we move forward or not.

Company

About Prolong

At Prolong, we believe post-purchase will become one of the most strategic layers of retail.

Repairs, returns, warranties, maintenance and customer care are no longer operational back-office processes. They are becoming major drivers of customer loyalty, profitability and sustainability.

That’s why we’re building Prolong.

A configurable operating system allowing the world’s largest retailers to orchestrate every aspect of their post-purchase operations.

Over the last two years, we’ve built the foundations.

Today, we’re reaching product-market fit with demanding enterprise customers across luxury, fashion and premium retail.

The next challenge is very different. It’s no longer about proving the product. It’s about building a platform capable of supporting hundreds of enterprise customers without becoming exponentially more complex.