We are looking for a Technical Lead for our core development team, to own the technical direction of the platform and its application layer: making the architectural decisions, setting engineering standards, and holding the coherence of the system as it evolves. The job requires close collaboration with the infrastructure team, operated by its own lead. The Technical Lead will be infra team’s primary counterpart on the product side, the person who ensures application and infrastructure decisions are made with awareness of each other. This is a hands-on leadership role. The platform is a high-traffic web service handling tens of millions of requests per day, with a data pipeline processing 50M+ user events daily that feeds both customer-facing analytics and billing. It runs on self-managed infrastructure across two datacenters, with a mix of long-lived legacy components and an active modernization program.
Core responsibilities: Platform architecture: 1. Own the architecture of the application and the direction it evolves in — service boundaries, data flow, queue design, how new capability is added without compounding existing debt. 2. Maintain an accurate working model of how traffic and data move through the platform — web tier, queues, database, search cluster, analytics pipeline, billing — and where the coupling and single points of failure are. 3. Make the architectural calls that individual contributors cannot make alone, and document the reasoning: so decisions remain legible later.
Engineering leadership: 1. Lead the development team technically: set standards for code review, testing, deployment practice, and what “done” means. 2. Grow the engineers around you. Raise the level of technical decision-making across the team rather than centralizing it. 3. In collaboration with the Product Manager, own technical planning and sequencing: break large initiatives into shippable phases, and make the tradeoff between delivery pace and technical health explicit rather than implicit.
Incident and reliability leadership: 1. Act as technical lead for major incidents affecting the application: hold the overall picture, direct investigation, prevent parallel duplicated effort, and make the judgement calls when mitigation options carry different tradeoffs. 2. Distinguish symptom from cause under time pressure, including when the visible failure is several layers away from the actual fault. 3. Ensure root causes and follow-up actions are captured accurately, and that follow-ups get prioritized rather than accumulating in a backlog.
Modernization: 1. Drive the application-side modernization roadmap alongside feature delivery. 2. Represent the application’s requirements in cross-cutting initiatives — database migration, multi-datacenter architecture — where the infrastructure side is led by SysOps but the application has to change with it. 3. Sequence work so that stability improvements and product initiatives do not starve each other.
Required experience: Technical depth: 1. Five+ years in software engineering, with at least 2–3 in a lead or principal capacity on a production system at meaningful scale. 2. Strong engineering background, with depth in at least one modern web stack and the ability to make architectural decisions in an unfamiliar one. 3. Practical working knowledge of the systems the application depends on: databases, distributed message queues, caching layers, search/analytics clusters. Enough to reason about failure modes and design around them, without needing to operate them yourself. 4. Comfortable working with an infrastructure team as a peer: able to have a technical conversation about capacity, edge behaviour, or database topology without owning it.
Leadership: 1. Experience leading a development team — through technical credibility, clear reasoning, and reliability rather than positional authority. 2. Experience influencing peers outside your own team, where you have no authority at
