Tech Lead

Title : Tech Lead

Location : Onsite at Photon locations (Chicago Dallas and New York).

The Role

Digital API team is looking for a hands-on Tech Lead with deep expertise to design and deliver domain-driven microservices for customer-facing digital experiences. Youll own greenfield builds from zero-to-production lead engineers by example (coding 70% of the time) and drive cross-team triage while keeping leadership proactively informed.

What Youll Do

• Design & build domain-driven event-aware microservices in (Express/Fastify/NestJS) with clean testable code.
• Architect greenfield systems: service boundaries data models REST APIs event streams CI/CD observability and runtime topology.
• Set API standards: versioning OpenAPI/Swagger pagination error contracts resiliency patterns (timeouts retries circuit breakers).
• Own production readiness: SLOs dashboards alerting runbooks; lead incident triage/bridge calls and drive blameless RCAs.
• Collaborate across teams (web mobile data security ops) to unblock work sequence dependencies and land integrated releases.
• Communicate proactively with leadership: crisp status risk/mitigation dependencies and measurable outcomes.
• Raise the bar: code reviews engineering best practices mentoring pair programming tech talks and documentation.
• Think two steps ahead: anticipate edge cases scaling operability and cost; recommend pragmatic sequencing and trade-offs.

Tech Stack Youll Work With

• Languages/Frameworks: TypeScript Express/Fastify/NestJS
• APIs: REST OpenAPI/Swagger OAuth2/OIDC JWT
• Data: PostgreSQL/MySQL NoSQL (MongoDB/DynamoDB) Redis cache
• Messaging/Streaming: Kafka/RabbitMQ (sagas outbox idempotency)
• Cloud & Platform: One major cloud (AWS/Azure/GCP) Docker Kubernetes API Gateway/Ingress IaC (Terraform/CloudFormation)
• CI/CD & Observability: GitHub Actions/Jenkins ELK/Dynatrace feature flags OpenTelemetry Datadog/New Relic/Prometheus log aggregation

What Youll Bring

• 8 years backend engineering (or equivalent impact) 3 years technical leadership on product teams.
• Expert-level with proven delivery of domain-driven microservices at scale.
• Strong grasp of DDD (entities/aggregates/bounded contexts) event-driven architectures and microservice patterns (saga outbox circuit breaker).
• Designed secure resilient public APIs used by web/mobile clients; deep understanding of authN/authZ (OAuth2/OIDC) secrets and TLS.
• Production experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native deployment CI/CD and observability (metrics traces logs SLOs).
• Demonstrated success leading triage/incident response and driving RCAs to lasting improvements.
• Outstanding communication-able to simplify complex trade-offs tell a delivery story and keep partners aligned.
• Bias for action: you go the extra mile anticipate the next two steps and ship high-quality software.

Nice to Have

• Experience in telecom (ordering provisioning billing identity) or large consumer digital platforms.
• API gateways (Apigee/Kong) rate limiting/quotas multi-tenant patterns.
• Performance tuning capacity planning and cost optimization in cloud environments.