Lead Engineer

Position: Lead Engineer

Location: New York NY

Duration: Fulltime

Interview Stages: 5

Scope of Role

Attention is hiring a senior software engineer to be a technical anchor on the New York team - shaping architecture mentoring engineers and driving high-impact projects from ambiguity to production. The team currently has 7 8 FDEs transitioning into developers most of whom have development backgrounds but are pretty junior. The need is one (potentially two or three) really solid senior devs who can provide oversight and mentorship ship features themselves and own the harder architectural problems that junior engineers Claude/Opus arent quite going to solve. Profile is a cracked tech lead not an engineering manager - strong individual contributor who can also review PRs of junior engineers and contribute as a senior team player by virtue of technical experience. The right person owns one of the more challenging flagship features as quickly as possible (e.g. agentic initiative that provides proactive suggestions to users on the homepage) gets to team lead level on a core product feature within 6 months. What Youll Own Technical Leadership

Own end-to-end design and implementation of complex cross-cutting features - from task breakdown through delivery monitoring and long-term maintenance Set the technical bar: produce elegant well-reasoned designs and high-quality code others can learn from and build on Drive architectural decisions and participate in design reviews ensuring systems are scalable maintainable and aligned with long-term vision Mentor and level up junior and mid-level engineers through code review pairing and thoughtful technical feedback

Product Mindset

Collaborate directly with product and design to translate ambiguous specs into clear well-scoped engineering plans Proactively identify opportunities to improve product quality developer velocity and business outcomes - not just execute on tickets Balance immediate business objectives against long-term architectural vision Champion the user experience from the engineering side

Reliability & Platform Health

Own the reliability of the systems you build: define SLOs instrument observability drive incident response and post-mortems Contribute to platform and infrastructure improvements - CI/CD pipelines deployment tooling production runbooks Champion engineering best practices around testing observability and on-call hygiene Lead capacity planning and performance work for critical services

Ramp Expectations

First month: come up to speed with smaller tickets as ramp Then: hit the ground running on a bigger more challenging flagship feature 6 months: team lead on a core product feature owning part of the product

MUST HAVE SKILLS

Candidate Scorecard - 10 Criteria - MAKE SURE TO NOTE HOW THE CANDIDATE MEETS EACH CRITERIA.

6 8 years of software engineering experience with strong distributed systems background

Go proficiency (backend; core codebase)

Experience with Kubernetes AWS GCP Redis and Temporal

Track record of shipping robust scalable systems at a high-growth startup

Ability to architect and own complex features end-to-end

Mentorship experience - reviewing PRs leveling up junior engineers

AI-forward mindset; fluent with modern AI coding tools (e.g. Claude)

Collaborative direct communicator with high ownership and grit

Startup experience at a product-focused high-expectation company