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FourKites is hiring a Technical Lead to own the engineering delivery of one of two high-impact domains: Ocean Visibility (OV) or Order Inventory Visibility (IV). These are the most data-intensive parts of the FourKites platform, which processes over 3.2 million supply chain events daily across 80+ countries and 1,600+ global brands.
This is an individual contributor technical leadership role, not a people-management position. You will be the engineering owner of your team's delivery, accountable for what ships, when it ships, and how well it is built. You will spend 40–60% of your time hands-on in code, setting technical direction, holding the bar on engineering practices, and driving delivery outcomes. An Engineering Manager will own the people side (headcount, performance reviews, compensation, career ladders); you own the technical and delivery outcome.
Key responsibilities include:
**Own Delivery**: Drive end-to-end technical delivery of your team's roadmap, from epic breakdown through production release. Partner with Product and Engineering Management to shape scope and sequence work realistically. Run sprint-level execution, identify risk early, surface and clear blockers, and keep commitments honest. Be the single technical point of accountability for release slips, migrations, or customer escalations. Drive production health through SLOs, on-call quality, alert hygiene, and root-cause follow-through.
**Set Technical Direction**: Own the architecture of your domain—service boundaries, data models, event contracts, and integration patterns aligned with FourKites' North Star architecture. Write and review design documents; make architectural calls and document trade-offs. Evaluate frameworks, tools, and third-party APIs; decide what to build, buy, or integrate. Maintain visibility of technical debt and negotiate roadmap capacity to pay it down. Design for the scale FourKites operates at.
**Hold the Engineering Bar**: Define and enforce team engineering standards—coding conventions, test strategy, PR size, review turnaround, branching, observability, and documentation. Review code with intent, catching design problems, not just style. Make quality measurable by tracking change failure rate, revert rate, escaped defects, MTTR, and cycle time. Raise the floor across the entire team. Champion secure-by-default and well-instrumented software.
**Multiply the Team**: Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing, and code review. Give the EM and PM a clear read on technical capability and delivery risk. Onboard new engineers quickly and keep domain knowledge documented. Participate in hiring as a technical interviewer.
**Work Across the Org**: Translate between engineering and Product, Implementation, Customer Engineering, Support, and customers. Coordinate with tech leads in adjacent domains on shared contracts and cross-team dependencies. Represent your domain in architecture reviews and platform-level decisions.
**Requirements:**
- 8+ years building and operating production software, including 2+ years as a tech lead, staff engineer, or equivalent leading a team's technical delivery
- Deep backend expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Go, with strong fundamentals in distributed systems and object-oriented design
- Hands-on experience designing microservices and event-driven systems (Kafka or similar), including idempotency, ordering, replay, and failure handling
- Strong data modelling and SQL skills on PostgreSQL (or equivalent), plus practical experience with caching (Redis) and query/performance tuning at scale
- Production experience on AWS with containerised deployments, CI/CD, and modern observability tooling
- Track record of shipping complex, multi-quarter work on time and identifying risk early
- Demonstrated ability to lift a team's engineering practices through standards, review, and mentorship
- Excellent written and verbal communication; can write design docs that executives and junior engineers both understand
- Comfortable with influence rather than authority; can guide teams to better answers without owning performance reviews
- Fluent in Agile delivery and tooling (Jira, Confluence, Git branching and rebasing)
- Comfortable working with distributed US–India teams and with customers directly
- Education: B.E, B.Tech, MCA, or M.Tech background
**Bonus qualifications:**
- For Ocean Visibility: experience with ocean and multimodal logistics data (container and booking milestones, bills of lading, carrier feeds, terminal/port data, AIS/vessel tracking, customs events); familiarity with logistics integration standards (EDI/EDIFACT, X12, DCSA APIs, INTTRA, CargoSmart); experience reconciling messy, late, duplicated, or conflicting third-party data into a single source of truth
- For Order Inventory Visibility: experience modelling orders, purchase orders, line items, SKUs, and inventory positions; integration experience with enterprise systems (SAP, Oracle, ERPs, OMS, WMS, TMS); experience building real-time digital twins with OTIF, fill-rate, and inventory-in-motion analytics
- For both: prior work in supply chain, logistics, or high-volume B2B enterprise SaaS; experience leading large-scale migrations or re-platforming; practical use of AI coding tools; experience in high-growth product organisations with enterprise customers
