We're looking for a hands-on Software Development Team Lead to guide a small, high-impact engineering team responsible for both monolithic application and a growing ecosystem of microservices. You'll split your time between technical leadership, architecture decisions, and staying close to the code — this is not a purely managerial role. You'll be the technical anchor for your team, helping navigate the tradeoffs of working across both architectural paradigms while mentoring engineers and driving delivery.
Key Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership
- Lead the design, development, and deployment of systems spanning both the existing monolithic codebase and newer microservices-based components
- Make architectural decisions around service boundaries, data consistency, API contracts, and inter-service communication
- Guide decisions on what stays in the monolith vs. what gets extracted into standalone services, balancing pragmatism with long-term scalability
- Drive best practices for code quality, testing, CI/CD, and system observability across both architectures
- Stay hands-on — contribute to code reviews, complex debugging, and critical feature development in both environments
Team Management
- Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 3–5 engineers, providing technical guidance and career development support
- Own sprint planning, task breakdown, and delivery timelines in collaboration with product stakeholders
- Conduct 1:1s, performance feedback, and foster a culture of ownership and continuous improvement
- Balance hands-on coding with team leadership responsibilities (40-50% technical, 50-60% leadership, adjustable based on team needs)
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner with Product Managers, QA, DevOps, and other engineering teams to align on technical roadmaps
- Translate business requirements into technical specifications and scalable solutions
- Communicate technical trade-offs and risks clearly to non-technical stakeholders, including monolith vs. microservices decisions
Full Stack Ownership
- Guide full stack development efforts — backend services primarily, with working knowledge of frontend integration points
- Ensure APIs and services are well-documented, secure, and performant end-to-end, whether served from the monolith or a microservice
Required Qualifications
- 5–8 years of software development experience, including backend and full stack work
- Proven experience working with both monolithic architectures and microservices — including maintaining legacy monolithic systems while incrementally modernizing
- Strong polyglot background — comfortable working across multiple languages/frameworks (e.g., .NET, Java/Spring Boot, Node.js, Python— adaptable based on project needs)
- Solid understanding of RESTful API design, message queues/event-driven architecture (Kafka, or similar)
- Experience with containerization and orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)
- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, Azure)
- Familiarity with relational and NoSQL databases (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.)
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices for both monolithic and distributed systems
- 1–3+ years of prior lead/mentorship experience — either as a formal team lead, tech lead, or senior engineer guiding junior developers
- Strong understanding of system design principles: scalability, fault tolerance, distributed transactions, caching strategies, and monolith decomposition patterns
- Excellent communication skills — able to work with both technical and non-technical stakeholders
Nice to Have
- Experience with strangler fig pattern or other monolith-to-microservices migration strategies
- Experience with service mesh technologies (Istio, Linkerd)
- Exposure to frontend frameworks (React, Angular, or Vue) for full stack collaboration
- Experience with monitoring/observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, Datadog)
- Prior experience in Agile/Scrum environments
- Contributions to open-source projects or technical blogs
