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Salary: USD 230,000 - 270,000 / annual
Altana is building an AI-powered product network for trusted trade, helping governments and businesses create a more resilient and secure global economy. The Engineering organization is responsible for building a platform fundamentally driven by AI that scales to massive data volumes and diverse customer bases.
As a Team Lead in Engineering, you will lead a small team of 3–4 engineers in delivering customer-focused products. This is a hands-on role where leading the team amplifies your own engineering leverage rather than replacing it. You'll embed with product and design, make day-to-day technical and product decisions, and own the full lifecycle from customer conversations through product launch and adoption.
Key responsibilities include:
- Ship production code and set the technical bar for the team. Own architecture, quality standards, and serve as the final line of defense before work reaches customers.
- Own the customer problem end-to-end, not just individual tickets. Define problems in your own words, make tactical product calls, and own metrics tied to customer outcomes.
- Maintain close customer contact through weekly calls and session reviews. Be able to articulate the top three friction points in your area at any time.
- Turn ambiguity into executable plans. Clarify goals, break unclear problems into milestones and MVP/GA releases, manage the backlog, and sequence work for steady, predictable progress.
- Build AI-native systems as a standard practice. Treat LLMs, agents, evals, and retrieval as core building blocks. Own standards for verifying AI-assisted code before shipping.
- Track team velocity using shared engineering metrics, identify bottlenecks, pay down operational debt, and escalate cross-team gaps to leadership.
- Lead incident response including on-call rotations. Treat cost as a design input and flag anomalies with proposed fixes. Uphold security standards in code review.
- Demo shipped work directly to customers, commercial teams, and leadership.
- Coach engineers, write reviews, provide actionable feedback, interview candidates, and foster a collaborative team culture.
Requirements:
- Real-world professional experience writing backend or data-driven software in demanding environments.
- Strong hands-on engineering skills and sound technical judgment. Must have deployed production code to cloud environments and know when designs need more input.
- Experience coaching, mentoring, and leading other engineers on complex projects (as tech lead, project lead, or senior engineer driving team efforts).
- Track record of staying close to customers, turning their problems into well-scoped shipped work, and delivering incremental releases from prototype to production.
- Experience running sprint planning and delivery for teams that consistently hit commitments.
- Comfort with operations including incidents, on-call, and system cost management.
- Strong written and verbal communication skills with good judgment about when to decide independently versus escalate.
- Experience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrieval.
Nice to have:
- Direct experience managing engineers.
- Experience using engineering metrics such as DORA or SPACE to improve team performance.
- Background in trade, supply chain, compliance, or government customer work.
