You will lead a team responsible for our production-critical data ingestion (scraping system, data normalization platform), our developer experience surface (Python mono repo, packages and services framework, CI/CD, shared images), our Airflow base layer, and our backoffice. These systems sit on the critical path for production – every other team depends on them, and uptime, incident response, and reliability are core to the role.
This role is for a hands-on technical leader who enjoys both shipping code and growing engineers. You'll spend roughly 50% of your time hands-on writing code, reviewing designs, and the rest leading the team, partnering with peer team leads, and shaping the technical direction of our platform with the VP R&D and CTO.
Responsibilities
Lead and grow a team of strong backend engineers, owning hiring, mentorship, performance, and personal growth.
Own the team's roadmap end-to-end: scoping, prioritization, delivery, and quality.
Drive the architecture and evolution of the platform layers your team owns – both the data plumbing that feeds us and the developer-experience surface other R&D teams build on.
Contribute hands-on (~50%) to design, code, code reviews, and production debugging.
Set and uphold engineering standards across the team – code quality, system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence.
Partner closely with peer team leads and the VP R&D to align on shared infrastructure, ownership boundaries, and developer experience.
Lead by example on production incidents and customer-impacting issues.
Influence broader R&D direction as a member of the R&D leadership forum.
Requirements
3+ years of experience as a team leader in a product-oriented R&D organization.
6+ years of hands-on Python development experience.
Strong background designing and operating distributed systems and microservices in production.
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments.
Solid working knowledge of GCP (or equivalent cloud) – Cloud Run, BigQuery, GCS, IAM.
Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines in a microservices / mono repo environment.
Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks.
Proven ability to balance hands-on contribution with team leadership at ~50/50.
Strong sense of ownership, end-to-end accountability, and a builder's mindset.
Excellent collaborator – comfortable working across teams and aligning on shared infrastructure ownership.
Advantages
Experience leading a platform / infrastructure / DevX team specifically (vs. a feature team).
Working knowledge of Helm charts and Terraform / Terragrunt as a consumer (you don't need to own them, but you should be able to read and reason about them).
Experience with web scraping systems at scale.
Experience with Python packaging, mono repo tooling, and shared library design.
Comfortable using GenAI tools (Cursor, Claude, etc.) as part of your engineering workflow.
B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent.
