Tech Lead-Backend

We are looking for a Staff Engineer to serve as the technical backbone across our multi-product, multi-pod engineering organisation. This is not a people-management role — it is a high-leverage individual contributor and craft leadership role. You will be the engineering conscience of the organisation: raising the bar on design, code quality, and technical thinking across every pod without owning any single one. Each pod operates autonomously with 2–7 backend engineers and 1-3 senior engineers (3–5 years of experience). Your job is to make those senior engineers — and the teams around them — meaningfully better: sharpening their design instincts, challenging their assumptions, and helping them make smarter trade-offs.

The Kind of Engineer Who Will Fit the Role

You care more about making the team better than being the smartest person in the room. You write

feedback that is honest but never unkind. You can hold a nuanced conversation about product

trade-offs, not just technical ones. You are energised by context-switching across domains rather

than drained by it. You believe that the highest form of engineering craft is not the code you write,

but the judgment you help others develop

Requirements

Technical Mentorship & Design Review

• Review architecture and design documents across all pods, providing clear, actionable feedback that teaches as much as it
corrects.

• Conduct deep-dive PR reviews on high-stakes changes, focusing on correctness, maintainability, and future extensibility —
not just style.

• Work 1:1 with pod senior engineers to develop their technical intuition: system design, trade-off analysis, and engineering
judgment.

• Run internal design review sessions, RFC processes, and post-mortems that build a culture of learning.

Cross-Product Technical Coherence

• Maintain a working understanding of all products and their underlying systems — enough to spot duplication, surface re-
use opportunities, and flag systemic risks.

• Identify and advocate for shared infrastructure, common patterns, and platform investments that multiply the productivity of
all pods.

• Serve as the go-to escalation point for hard technical problems across the organization.

Engineering Quality & Standards

• Define and evolve engineering standards: code quality, documentation, testing philosophy, observability, and API design.

• Own and curate the internal engineering handbook — turning tribal knowledge into durable institutional practice.

• Champion operational excellence: reliability, performance budgets, scalability thinking, and incident learning.

Product & Prioritisation Thinking

• Partner with pod engineers and product stakeholders to help scope, estimate, and sequence technical work with a focus
on delivering real product value.

• Challenge teams to think critically about build vs. buy, MVP scope, and long-term architectural implications of near-term
decisions.

• Bridge the gap between engineering effort and product outcomes — helping teams ask the right questions before writing
a line of code.

Must-Have Experience

• 8+ years of software engineering, with at least few years at a senior or staff level in a product engineering environment.

• Demonstrated track record of improving the technical quality and output of engineering teams — not just shipping product
yourself.

• Deep backend engineering expertise (system design, distributed systems, databases, performance, reliability).

• Strong written communication: your design doc reviews and RFC feedback are models of clarity and constructive critique.

• Comfort holding context across multiple products simultaneously without losing depth on any one of them.