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.