Senior Engineer, Team Lead

About Shelf

There is no AI Strategy without a Data Strategy. Getting GenAI to work is mission-critical for most companies but 90% of AI projects havent been deployed. Why Poor data quality is the #1 obstacle companies face in getting GenAI projects into production.

Weve helped some of the best brands including Glovo Lufthansa Herbalife and Nespresso solve their data issues and deploy their AI strategy with Day 1 ROI.

Simply put Shelf unlocks AI readiness. We provide the core infrastructure that enables GenAI to be deployed at scale. We help companies deliver more accurate GenAI answers by eliminating bad data in documents and files before they are fed into an LLM thereby preventing the creation of incorrect answers.

Shelf is partnered with Microsoft Salesforce Snowflake Databricks OpenAI and other big tech players who are bringing GenAI to the enterprise.

Our mission is to empower humanity with better answers everywhere.

Senior Engineering Team Lead

What youll lead and how youll work

As a Senior Engineering Team Lead of Platform at Shelf you will own the delivery of the Platform infrastructurethe foundation that enables the core capabilities of a future-proof knowledge platform. You will manage and grow a backend-centric Platform team consisting of software engineers DevOps SRE and QA specialists partnering closely with Staff Engineers Tech Leads Product Managers and other Engineering Managers who lead product development teams.

Youll set clear contracts and boundaries between platform surfaces and product services; prevent creating bespoke solutions for product teams; earn self-service adoption with strong defaults and drive complex migration programs with thoughtful deprecations rather than rewrites.

Reliability will be operated efficiently with SLOs and error budgets; incidents will be handled with a healthy oncall runbooks and blameless reviews; and cost will be measured and managed as a firstclass outcome. While product teams own their services and oncall the Platform team provides the defaults guardrails and consultation.

Together with Product Managers youll exercise product thinking to enhance developer productivity reduce cognitive load and ultimately decrease time-to-market.

What youll bring

Youve managed platform/infrastructure teams in product companies that operate multi-tenant distributed systems processing big volumes of structured or unstructured data. Youre comfortable operating in AWS with eventdriven/serverless patterns and modern data pipelines and you can challenge solution designs and sequence complex migrations with high delivery velocity while maintaining high system uptime.

Youve built paved roads that product teams adopt voluntarily run successful architecture modernization programs and operate to SLOs and error budgets solving development cross-team collaboration and production support challenges.

You have a proven track record of developing Tech Leads and Senior ICs hire well and foster a culture that values reliability learning and clear ownership.

What success looks like in the first 12 months

In the first 3 months you will establish a transparent approach to the Platform Roadmap accounting for the business needs and proactively accommodating external factors such as cloud provider system updates and API deprecations. You will delineate the boundaries between platform and product team scopes.

By the end of your first year Platform will be measurably easier and safer to build on. Most new services will adopt the paved road by default. Platform-owned surfaces will adhere to explicit SLOs featuring a visible error budget policy and faster recovery when incidents occur. A new region will be live with the same IaC observability and compliance posture as our existing regions and our unit costs per request and per GB processed will trend down with regular reviews and targeted optimizations.

Key Responsibilities

1. Roadmap co-creation: Collaborate with the Platform PM and StaffEng to develop the roadmap: balance business needs technical dependencies and external factors.
2. Implement technical strategy: Deliver the platform enhancements and perform updates and migrations according to the architecture and technical direction defined by Staff Engineers in collaboration with the Platform and Product teams.
3. SLO-driven reliability: Operate platform services to explicit SLOs with visible error budgets. Reduce Platform-related CFR and MTTR constituents and enhance system resilience according to reliability standards.
4. Developer Experience: Partner with Staff Engineers and Technical Leads to ensure platform surfaces meet the defined contracts and boundaries and that the paved roads service templates CI/CD patterns and IaC modules are used to their best advantage.
5. FinOps & cost management: Drive projects to optimize unit economics (cost per request per GB processed per tenant) and cost allocation as first-class engineering outcomes.
6. Tech Lead and Senior IC development: Coach the Platform Tech Lead and senior ICs through implementation challenges 1:1s and hands-on technical mentorship.
7. Process & tooling optimization: Refine SDLC observability practices and engineering workflows.. Champion AI-assisted development and automation.
8. Stakeholder communication: Report platform health delivery status and operational metrics to leadership. Showcase how platform capabilities enable product velocity and demonstrate measurable impact on developer productivity and system reliability.
9. Autonomous day-to-day execution: Operate independently to clear delivery blockers manage operational risks and balance platform evolution with stability security and compliance requirements (GDPR data residency audit trails).

Qualifications

Note: This position does not assume developing system architecture and daily coding.

• 4 years of Team Lead experience leading cross-functional backend-centric teams (10 engineers) in product companies operating multi-tenant SaaS systems.
• 5 years as a Senior Software Engineer Tech Lead or Staff Engineer with deep or Python expertise.
• Understanding of AWS cloud primitives; hands-on experience with compute storage messaging and databases (SQL and NoSQL).
• Infrastructure as Code experience: CI/CD pipeline design and optimization.
• Experience with API management (versioning backward-compatibility contract testing) service catalogs and developer experience tooling.
• Personally built and operated distributed systems event-driven architectures and cloud-native applications; led complex migrations.
• Comfortable with high-volume data processing and schema design/performance tuning at scale.
• Translate complex technical constraints into business-intelligible trade-offs; align platform capabilities with product team needs.
• Experience with SLO/error budget frameworks incident management FinOps and observability best practices.
• Strong track record coaching Tech Leads and Senior ICs implementing SDLC and reliability practices and partnering with Product Management
• Present work effectively through clear architecture diagrams documentation and verbal communication; communicate technical strategies to leadership.
• Proficiency with AI-powered development tools (GitHub Copilot Claude etc.) and eagerness to push AI-assisted engineering workflows.
• Proactive problem-solver with genuine curiosity - never satisfied with good enough constantly refining tools and approaches.
• As a plus the Databricks or Snowflake integration experience is beneficial.

What Shelf Offers:

• B2B contract.
• Company Stock Options.
• Hardware: MacBook Pro.
• Modern technical stack. Develop open-source software.
• GitHub Copilot subscription.
• Access to Claude Code OpenAI Codex TypingMind and MCP Servers.

Why Shelf:

• GenAI is expected to be a $4 trillion market by 2032 and Shelf is a core infrastructure that enables GenAI to be deployed at scale.
• Our Leadership Team possesses deep knowledge management and AI domain expertise as well as an enterprise SaaS background to execute this plan effectively.
• Weve been helping our customers prevent knowledge mismanagement since our founding in 2017.
• We have raised over $60 million in funding with investors including Tiger Global Insight Partners Base10 and others.
• We have experienced high velocity growth powered by the most innovative product in our category achieving 3X growth for 3 consecutive years.
• We now have over 100 employees in multiple U.S. states and European countries and we have ambitious hiring goals over the next few months.

Our Values:

Quality- Were united by our focus on worldclass Quality. Quality in all things starting with everything that leaves your desk. Everything you touch every email report campaign and piece of code should be outstanding. Your work product should blow people away. Having people look at what youve done and say Wow. Thats the standard here. Remember that how you do anything is how you do everything. Focus on craftsmanshipyour ability to make things better.

Momentum- for us means that you should know that the things youre responsible for are moving forward. When you look around and see something thats stalled get it moving again. We pride ourselves on ball movement. When your boss or team leaves you with something they should return to see measurable progress. Small continuous movement is our recipe for success. Constantly look for how to make the work around you move forward. We want you to initiate solutions ideas and progress. Dont wait for it to come to youreach out and create movement. All the time.

Accountability- We expect every team member to feel that they are accountable for more than anyone might normally expect. Each of us should feel real responsibility for things even at the edge of our control. We consistently share and align on expectations give each other open and respectful feedback and use those two drivers to ensure that every agreement we make with one another is clear and complete.

Hard Work- Were here to do something difficult together. We care intensely about the mission and we expect that from our teammates. That care means that we work hard here. Hard work comes with long hours extra effortand real opportunity at Shelf. Your passion for creating and sustaining output is a part of our DNA. Support each other cheer each other on drive the mission forward. Great teams sustain intense effort together to win.

Learning Agility- Were innovating in one of the fastestmoving spaces in history at a time of accelerating global change. Thats incredibly exciting and requires each of us to commit fully to learning each and every day so that we can be the best at what we do. None of us know everything. All of us can learn anything. Staying open and constantly curious is a key success driver at Shelf. It also requires humility. We prize people who are consistently humble and open to making mistakes and growing from them. Recognize also that learning itself is a skillwe need you to be really good at it. Keep dialing in your own understanding about how you learn best and push yourself to keep growing.

Adapt and Thrive- Overcoming challenges lives deep in our DNA. We have a proud history of understanding and living the reality that obstacles are our opportunitiestheyre the key to our success. Change is a constant in our business and fighting change is counterproductive. We need you to be good at being uncomfortable and understand that discomfort is the key to growth. Cultivate your own ability to adapt and know that struggling well is something youll share with every team youre on at Shelf. Our company stories are about thriving through real difficultytogether.

Win Together- We win or lose as a team. Always. Everything you do here is connected to the rest of the organization. Part of our shared team environment demands full honestyreal candor and directness with one another. We expect you to constantly be thinking about how to support your teammates and the company always acting in service to our shared mission and whats best for the organization as a whole.