Technical Lead Manager

Responsibilities:

• Platform services and database connectors that carry real weight. You'll lead the development of highly scalable, reliable, and secure platform services and database connectors that power mission-critical data pipelines for thousands of enterprise customers. When a connector breaks, someone's revenue reporting is wrong that morning, and they know it.
• Pipelines into the modern data stack. These pipelines connect to warehouses like Snowflake, BigQuery, and Databricks, as well as data lakes like Apache Iceberg. Each destination has its own semantics, its own failure behavior, and its own performance envelope, and your team owns getting all of them right.
• Observability, reliability, security, and auditability as defaults. These get embedded into everything your team ships rather than bolted on when a customer asks. You set that standard, and you hold the line on it.
• The hard problems underneath. Exactly-once delivery when any component can fail. Multi-tenancy where one customer's load never touches another's. Schema changes are arriving mid-flight from a source system that gave no notice. None of these get solved once.

What a good first year looks like:

• The framework is generating production connectors, and the quality bar is set by evaluations you designed.
• Shipping a new connector takes a fraction of the time it does today, and you can prove it with a number.
• You've hired two or three engineers yourself, and they're shipping.
• At least one person on your team has been promoted.

What will stretch you:

• You'll be shipping systems whose output isn't fully predictable, so "does it work" turns into a measurement problem rather than a test case.
• Some days the system needs you, and the team needs you at the same time, and you'll be making that call yourself.
• You'll answer for code you didn't write and increasingly for code a machine wrote.
• Nothing stays solved here. Our volume doubles every six months, and the tooling shifts under you every quarter.

Requirements:

• 8+ years on backend or distributed systems.
• At least a year leading a team, and it doesn't have to have been official. If you're already the person everyone goes to, that counts.
• You've run something in production and been there when it broke. On-call, incidents, SLAs.
• Strong Java or another JVM language, with Kafka and Kubernetes in production.
• Real experience with multi-tenant systems, high availability, or data at volume.
• You've built something with LLMs rather than just used a coding assistant. Agents, evaluations, retrieval, prompt systems in production, and any of it.
• You can explain a complicated system to someone who isn't an engineer.
• You've given someone hard feedback and kept the relationship afterwards.