Team Lead - Platform Core

5+ years of professional software engineering experience, including 3+ years recent production [protected info] / TypeScript / Javascript.
3+ years in a Team Lead, Tech Lead, or equivalent role formally accountable for a development team's delivery and quality outcomes.
Demonstrated ownership of sprint delivery, scope commitment, and code review discipline for a team.
Track record of mentoring engineers across junior-to-senior levels.
Experience operating in a microservice, multi-repo environment.
Hands-on experience using AI coding tools in a production team setting, with awareness of review/QA guard rails.
Required Technical Skills
The team operates a polyglot, microservice-heavy estate (50+ services). Strong, demonstrable depth in the core runtimes is essential:
[protected info] with JavaScript and TypeScript - the dominant stack (38 of the team's services). Deep production experience required.
Backend service and API design - REST and contract-driven integration patterns; API versioning and backward-compatibility discipline.
Distributed systems & messaging - experience with socket/real-time services and message middleware (e.g., Kafka, RabbitMQ, ZeroMQ, etc.).
Microservice architecture in a multi-repo environment; strong Git and PR-based workflow discipline.
Solid grasp of runtime stability, observability, and incident diagnosis.
Valued / Secondary Skills
Go - a growing share of newer platform services (gateways, identity, operator, reporting) are written in Go; working proficiency is a strong advantage.
Java (Spring Boot / Netty) - used in socket, real-time, and game-history services.
Experience integrating and governing third-party / external vendor integrations.
Prior work in regulated or high-availability environments
AI at company / organizational level - experience contributing to AI governance, tooling evaluation, and rollout of AI-assisted workflows across teams or the wider organization
Leadership & Soft Skills
Proven experience leading a development team and owning sprint delivery outcomes.
Strong written and spoken English - all organizational communication is in English; the team includes distributed engineers.
Ability to mentor engineers across junior-to-senior levels.
Comfortable distinguishing what the team owns versus what requires escalation or cross-functional coordination.
Effective cross-team and stakeholder communication, including negotiating shared contracts and coordinating dependencies with other verticals.
Role Boundaries (Cannot Do)
This role explicitly does not:
Approve production releases (release approval is Technical Director authority).
Override architecture standards (Chief Architect owns enterprise standards).
Override Technical Director decisions or commit delivery externally.
Redefine cross-team contracts unilaterally.
Hold final hiring, budget, or cross-vertical prioritization authority.
Success Metrics (First 6-12 Months)
Predictable sprint delivery and scope commitment accuracy.
Zero undocumented breaking API changes; backward-compatibility discipline upheld.
Shared service runtime stability within SLA.
Code review and engineering-standard compliance within the team.
Active, structured capability development across team members.
AI-assisted development adoption across all team members - scoped to approved tooling and your framework's guard rails (named senior reviewer, same review/QA gates).
Quality of AI-assisted output maintained - defect rate at or below baseline, healthy acceptance rate, no increase in review overhead.
Active contribution to AI governance and innovation - surfacing blockers, sharing patterns, and feeding structured input into the evaluation/governance process.