TECHNICAL LEAD

ROLE OVERVIEW

The Technical Lead is a key technical leader responsible for defining engineering direction, driving architectural decisions, and ensuring the delivery of high-quality, scalable, and reliable software. This role combines deep hands-on engineering expertise with technical leadership, guiding the team through complex technical challenges while ensuring solutions align with product strategy and long-term business objectives.

Working closely with product, design, and engineering teams, the Technical Lead establishes technical standards, drives system design, and empowers engineers to deliver exceptional outcomes. They take ownership of the technical roadmap, balance immediate delivery needs with long-term architectural considerations, and champion engineering excellence across the organization.

The ideal candidate is a strong technical decision-maker who can move comfortably between high-level architecture and hands-on implementation. They are passionate about solving complex problems, developing engineering talent, and building systems that are scalable, maintainable, secure, and observable.

• You show up like an owner.

• You want to maximize the value of equity and solve problems for others.

TEAM VALUES

❤️ Integrity – We prioritize integrity over comfort, convenience, and the shortcuts to success that drive metrics but undermine trust.

❤️ Trust – We cannot win unless we win on trust. Trust is hard to earn and easy to lose. We need it built into our DNA.

❤️ Competitiveness – We believe competitiveness is a critical complement to integrity and trust. If we’re not our customers’ best choice, we’re wasting their time. We respect the competition and know that winning requires us to be uniquely competitive.

❤️ Empowerment – Every win we achieve should first and foremost be a win for others, starting with our customers and serving their long-term best interests.

VACATION AND BENEFITS

We recognize the energy and commitment required to deliver on an ambitious mission, and we want our team to be rested, supported, and ready to succeed.

• 30 days of PTO annually for vacation, personal days, or illness, including five designated company-wide closure days around the start and end of the year.

• Health, dental, and wellness benefits.

• A technology allowance to help set you up for success.

• Pregnancy and parental leave policies designed to support your family’s next stage of growth.

EMPLOYEE OWNERSHIP

We’re a team on a mission. We expect a high degree of ownership from one another and pair that expectation with a higher-than-usual level of employee ownership in the company.

We want people who think beyond their individual contributions, take responsibility for outcomes, and actively build long-term value for the business, our customers, and their teammates.

WHAT YOU WILL BE DOING

Technical Strategy & Architecture

• Own and evolve the technical architecture, engineering standards, and technology decisions that support the company’s product strategy and long-term growth.

• Lead the design and implementation of scalable, maintainable, and observable applications across the frontend and backend using modern JavaScript and TypeScript ecosystems, including React, Next.js, Node.js, and frameworks such as NestJS or Express.

• Define architectural patterns, service boundaries, API contracts, and data strategies that support reliability, security, performance, and future extensibility.

• Guide the design and optimization of relational and non-relational databases, including PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Redis, with consideration for transactional consistency, query performance, and multi-tenancy.

• Establish best practices for API design, authentication, authorization, input validation, rate limiting, and real-time communication using REST, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets, or server-sent events.

• Evaluate and make informed technology choices, balancing engineering complexity, developer productivity, scalability, maintainability, and speed to market.

• Identify architectural risks, technical debt, and opportunities for platform improvements, prioritizing investments that deliver meaningful business and engineering value.

• Champion secure-by-design principles, accessibility, performance optimization, and resilient system design throughout the development lifecycle.

Hands-On Technical Leadership

• Remain hands-on in critical areas of the codebase, contributing to complex implementations, technical proofs of concept, and high-impact engineering initiatives.

• Set the standard for code quality, testing, maintainability, and engineering discipline across frontend and backend development.

• Lead the development of robust backend services using clean architecture principles, domain-driven design, and well-defined interfaces.

• Guide frontend architecture and application performance, including state management, server-side rendering, caching, code splitting, and progressive rendering strategies.

• Establish effective observability practices through structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and monitoring tools such as OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

• Define engineering standards for automated testing, code review, static analysis, and continuous integration to improve quality and reduce delivery risk.

• Lead technical investigations and resolve complex production issues, focusing on root-cause analysis, system reliability, and preventative improvements.

Engineering Infrastructure & Delivery

• Guide the design and evolution of CI/CD pipelines, deployment strategies, development environments, and release processes.

• Establish best practices for cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment using technologies such as AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, and infrastructure-as-code tools where appropriate.

• Evaluate and oversee the integration of cloud-native services, object storage, background job processing, event-driven architecture, and messaging systems.

• Drive improvements in build tooling, developer workflows, automated testing, and local development environments to increase engineering productivity.

• Define release readiness criteria, rollback strategies, and production monitoring practices that support safe and reliable deployments.

• Work with the team to establish meaningful engineering metrics and feedback loops, using them to improve system quality, delivery predictability, and operational performance.

Technical Decision-Making & Collaboration

• Serve as the primary technical leader for the engineering team, translating product requirements and business objectives into clear technical strategies and implementation plans.

• Partner with product, design, and business stakeholders to shape the roadmap, assess feasibility, identify dependencies, and establish realistic delivery expectations.

• Lead architecture reviews and technical discussions, clearly communicating trade-offs, risks, costs, and recommendations to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Align engineering teams around shared architectural principles, API contracts, development standards, and reusable technical capabilities.

• Make pragmatic decisions that balance short-term delivery with long-term technical sustainability.

• Proactively identify technical bottlenecks, delivery risks, and opportunities to simplify systems or accelerate execution.

• Foster a culture of accountability, transparency, collaboration, and continuous improvement.

Engineering Leadership & Mentorship

• Provide technical direction, mentorship, and support to engineers across experience levels, helping them grow their technical judgment, implementation skills, and problem-solving capabilities.

• Lead code reviews, design reviews, architecture sessions, and technical planning discussions.

• Establish clear expectations for engineering quality, ownership, and collaboration.

• Delegate technical ownership effectively, empowering engineers to make decisions while providing guidance on complex or high-risk challenges.

• Promote knowledge sharing through technical documentation, design proposals, engineering discussions, and retrospectives.

• Help the team identify skill gaps and development opportunities, fostering an environment where engineers can grow and take on increasing responsibility.

• Champion a culture of engineering excellence without creating unnecessary process or bottlenecks.

Agile Execution & Continuous Improvement

• Own technical planning and execution across engineering initiatives, including estimation, backlog refinement, sprint planning, and dependency management.

• Break down complex technical initiatives into clear, achievable milestones with defined outcomes and delivery expectations.

• Work closely with product and engineering stakeholders to prioritize work based on customer impact, business value, technical risk, and engineering capacity.

• Ensure technical initiatives are delivered with appropriate testing, documentation, observability, and operational readiness.

• Lead continuous improvement across engineering workflows, tooling, architecture, and development practices.

• Maintain a clear view of technical debt, system health, delivery risks, and upcoming architectural needs.

• Take accountability for the quality and reliability of solutions delivered by the team, not just the completion of individual tasks.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with significant experience building and operating production applications across the frontend and backend.

• Previous experience leading technical projects, initiatives, or engineering teams, with the ability to influence technical direction and drive outcomes through others.

• Strong proficiency in JavaScript and TypeScript, with deep experience in React, Next.js, Node.js, or comparable modern technologies.

• Demonstrated experience designing scalable application architectures, backend services, APIs, data models, and cloud-based systems.

• Strong understanding of system design, distributed systems fundamentals, security, performance optimization, observability, and production reliability.

• Experience establishing engineering standards, improving development workflows, and implementing effective CI/CD and automated testing practices.

• The ability to make sound architectural decisions, communicate technical trade-offs, and balance engineering quality with business priorities.

• A track record of mentoring engineers, facilitating technical discussions, and creating alignment across cross-functional teams.

• A pragmatic, hands-on approach to problem-solving, with the ability to dive into code when needed while maintaining a broader architectural perspective.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to build trust with engineers, product leaders, and business stakeholders.

• A strong sense of ownership, accountability, and commitment to building products that deliver meaningful customer value.

THIS IS A GOOD FIT FOR YOU IF…

• You’re mission-driven and want to solve the mission’s hardest technical problems.

• You want to shape the technical direction of a product and have a meaningful impact on the company’s success.

• You enjoy combining hands-on engineering with architecture, technical decision-making, and developing other engineers.

• You take ownership of outcomes, think beyond your immediate responsibilities, and are motivated by building long-term company value.

• You thrive in an environment that values integrity, trust, competitiveness, and empowerment.

• You’re comfortable operating in a fast-moving environment where the right balance of speed, quality, and sound judgment matters.

• You’re keen to work in person with a team and collaborate closely to build something meaningful.