We are seeking a Tech Lead to own the technical coherence, delivery, and production health of an engineering domain. Our client's platform supports critical operations across defence, intelligence, and law enforcement.
In this role, you will lead the unification of two technical foundations into a single, scalable platform featuring a shared semantic layer, robust governance, and repeatable customer deployments.
This role offers two distinct career tracks (assigned prior to interviewing):
Engineering Track: Deep technical leadership without line management, staying ~50% hands-on with complex architecture and service extractions.
Management Track: Technical domain ownership combined with direct line management (~20–30% hands-on reading/reviewing code, leading team growth and performance).
Key Responsibilities
- Architectural Leadership: Author design records, define service boundaries/typed contracts, and lead legacy migration paths without stopping active delivery.
- Delivery & Governance: Partner with Product to lead technical feasibility reviews, scope epics/stories, defend engineering health, and maintain realistic commitments.
- Production Ownership: Define and enforce SLOs, instrumentation, alerting, and incident response; manage cost and performance budgets across hosted, on-premise, and air-gapped installs.
- Technical Quality: Enforce high standards for code reviews, testing, and CI pipelines while mentoring engineers to raise the team's technical ceiling.
- People Management (Management Track Only): Handle direct line management, performance reviews, career development, stretch assignments, and recruitment loops.
Requirements
- Expert production proficiency in one primary language (TypeScript, Python, or Go) alongside working fluency in a second, with sound architectural judgment on when to use each.
- Solid experience in API/contract design (typed HTTP/RPC, schema validation, Fastify/Hono), production PostgreSQL (data modeling, query plans, safe migrations), and event-driven systems (Kafka/Redpanda, Temporal).
- Practical fluency with Kubernetes, GitOps (Argo CD, Helm), and observability/reliability practices (OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, Grafana, SLOs, incident command).
- Hands-on security experience with OAuth2/OIDC, multi-tenant isolation, relationship/attribute-based authorization, audit logging, and secret handling.
- Proven track record of owning a live, complex legacy-to-target system migration to completion.
- Strong written communication for architecture decision records (ADRs), RFCs, and incident post-mortems, paired with remote-async work discipline
- Experience with open table formats (Iceberg/DuckDB), air-gapped/offline delivery, defense/public-sector domains.
Benefits
- Full Remote Set Up
- Company equipment and a home office budget
- Relocation Support
Education and experience
- Minimum of 2 years of technical/people leadership.
- Passionate about EU Security and Defence.
