Lead - Software Engineering

Fundamentals
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
7+ years building and operating backend or infrastructure systems that real users depend on, including 2+ years leading engineers (tech lead, team lead or equivalent).
Deep understanding of distributed systems: concurrency, consistency, caching, messaging (Kafka or similar), failure modes and capacity planning.
Depth in at least one statically-typed language on a managed runtime, in production. We work on the JVM (Java/Vert.x); strong JVM internals (GC, memory, threading, profiling) is a big plus.
Track record of designing and maintaining shared libraries, frameworks or platform services used by many teams - including API design, versioning and safe rollout.
Hands-on with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines and at least one major cloud; comfortable with observability stacks (metrics, logs, tracing).
Proficiency across SQL and NoSQL stores (MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch...) - choosing by access pattern rather than familiarity.
Leadership
Able to turn a direction into an executable plan and deliver it with a team, while keeping quality and reliability high.
Clear written and verbal communication: you write design docs others can decide on, and you report status and risks honestly and early.
Comfortable working within a broader platform leadership structure - aligning upward, pushing back with data, and committing once a decision is made.
You coach engineers and grow them, not just assign tickets.
AI-era expectations
You work fluently with AI coding assistants and agents and can articulate where they help, where they hurt, and how your team verifies their output.
Builder mindset: you ship whole things, not tickets - prototype, write the migration, tune the query, debug the deploy.
You have built tooling that made you and your team faster, and you want to do that for the whole engineering org.