About the role
Responsibilities:
- Own delivery for your team. Break down initiatives, sequence work, remove blockers, ship on committed dates without burning the team out.
- Set the technical bar. Drive code review culture, define standards for quality, testing, observability, and on-call. Enforce them by example, not memos.
- Grow the people. Run meaningful 1:1s, give clear feedback, define growth paths, and coach engineers into stronger versions of themselves.
- Contribute technically. Design and review architecture across our stack: web, backend services, AI/voice integrations. Write code where it matters most.
- Partner with the CTO. Translate product and business direction into technical plans. Surface trade-offs early, own the follow-through.
- Build the operating rhythm. Sprint planning, retros, incident reviews, release cadence not as ceremony, but as the system that keeps a small team scaling.
Requirements:
- 5-6+ years of engineering experience, with at least the last 1-2 years in a lead, tech lead, or engineering manager capacity.
- Programming ability is mandatory; you are a working manager, not a proxy.
- Strong depth in at least two of Node.js, Python, or React; comfortable enough in the third to review and unblock.
- Sound systems judgment: you can look at a design, spot the load-bearing assumptions, and call out what will fail before it does.
- Direct experience running 1:1s and giving performance feedback.
- Comfortable owning delivery to committed dates, and communicating trade-offs honestly when reality moves the target.
- Ability to work across two product surfaces (SaaS and Voice AI) without needing to specialise in either from day one; enough range to hold context on both.
Good to have:
- Working knowledge of Go; we use it in parts of the stack, and it is a plus, not a filter.
- Experience with real-time or voice systems (WebRTC, streaming pipelines, LLM/ASR/TTS integration).
- Prior experience in a small startup engineering team as a founding engineer, early lead, or first EM role in a growing company.
- Track record of hiring engineers who later grew into leaders themselves.
- Experience with observability, on-call, and incident review at a serious level.