Tech Lead

The Engineering Excellence Team is for engineers who build the systems that power everything else. No product tickets. No UI tweaks. No support loops. You’ll create the tools, standards, and frameworks that make every development team faster and stronger. 

This is deep technical work with massive impact - shaping architecture, unifying processes, and defining how engineering is done across the company. A place for senior engineers who want to build the backbone, not the features. This is not a product team. It’s a technical excellence engine for people who want to build the systems behind the systems - and elevate the whole company through world‑class engineering.   

RESPONSIBILITIES  

• Technical Quality Ownership - Set and enforce technical standards for code quality, testing practices, deployment procedures, and observability across all teams. Ensure deliverables consistently meet company and industry standards  
• Security & Compliance - Champion security best practices in application design and delivery. Drive secure coding standards, dependency management, and vulnerability remediation across the development lifecycle
• Technology Decisions - Drive and consult on technology choices in collaboration with the Architect and engineering teams. Evaluate new tools, frameworks, and patterns with a clear focus on efficiency, maintainability, and long-term sustainability
• Architecture & Design Guidance - Review and guide system designs, API contracts, data models, and integration patterns. Ensure business requirements are implemented following sound architectural principles and established standards
• Hands-On Engineering - Stay deeply hands-on with production code. Lead by example in modern Java (21/25), Spring Boot 3/4, PHP, Laravel, NodeJS, Kafka Streams, and cloud-native microservices. Conduct in-depth code reviews and contribute to critical path development
• Observability & Operational Excellence - Define and drive observability standards (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting) to ensure production systems are transparent, diagnosable, and reliable
• Technology Adoption - Drive the adoption of new technologies and practices across teams. Build proof-of-concepts, define migration paths, and ensure smooth rollouts with minimal disruption
• Cross-Team Collaboration - Act as the technical mediator between Java teams, Team Leads, the Architect, and business stakeholders. Translate business requirements into sound technical guidance and ensure alignment across all parties
• Knowledge Sharing - Foster a culture of technical excellence through design reviews, tech talks, documentation, and hands-on mentoring of senior engineers 

Employees may be required to participate in an on-call rotation, ensuring availability outside regular working hours to respond to urgent issues as needed as per the On call policy.  

REQUIREMENTS  

• Experience: 7+ years of hands-on backend development with strong expertise, including 2+ years in a technical leadership capacity (Tech Lead, Principal Engineer, or equivalent).  
• Technical Expertise:   
  • Deep knowledge of Java (21+), PHP or NodeJS concurrency, JVM internals, and performance characteristics   
  • Strong experience with building production-grade microservices   
  • Strong expertise with Kafka and Kafka Streams — event-driven architectures, stream processing, schema evolution, and exactly-once semantics   
  • Solid understanding of REST API design principles and synchronous integration patterns   
  • Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, GitOps (ArgoCD, Kustomize), and container orchestration   
  • Experience defining and implementing observability strategies (metrics, distributed tracing, structured logging, alerting)   
  • Strong understanding of application security practices, secure coding, and dependency management   
  • Solid database knowledge: relational and document databases, data modeling, and performance tuning  
• Soft Skills: Excellent communicator who can translate between technical and business language. Comfortable presenting ideas, challenging decisions constructively, and building consensus across teams.   
• Collaboration: Proven ability to work effectively with Architects, Team Leads, Product, and DevOps in a cross-functional environment.   
• Mindset: Ownership-driven, pragmatic, and passionate about engineering excellence. You care as much about maintainability and operational quality as you do about shipping features.   

NICE TO HAVE  

• Experience in iGaming, Sportsbook, or real-time transaction-heavy systems  
• CDC architectures (Debezium)  
• Redis or distributed caching strategies  
• Performance tuning and benchmarking (JMH, async-profiler, JFR)  
• Architecture patterns such as DDD, CQRS, or Event Sourcing  
• Contributions to open-source projects