Technical Engineering Lead/Manager

Role Overview

We are looking for a hands-on Technical Engineering Manager to lead our engineering team, guide technical decisions, review code and architecture, and ensure high-quality product delivery. This role is ideal for someone who can balance team management with active technical contribution.

The Technical Engineering Manager will be responsible for managing developers, improving engineering processes, reviewing technical designs, ensuring code quality, and helping the team deliver reliable, scalable, and maintainable software.

This is not a purely people-management role. The right candidate should be comfortable writing code, debugging issues, reviewing pull requests, mentoring engineers, and making sound technical decisions.

Key Responsibilities

Technical Leadership

• Provide technical direction for product development and engineering execution.
• Review architecture, database design, APIs, integrations, and system workflows.
• Ensure the product is built with scalability, security, performance, and maintainability in mind.
• Participate in technical discussions and help the team make practical engineering decisions.
• Identify technical risks early and propose solutions.
• Ensure engineering decisions align with product and business priorities.

Hands-On Coding

• Contribute to code when needed, especially for complex features, critical bugs, prototypes, or technical proof-of-concepts.
• Help troubleshoot production issues and guide root cause analysis.
• Support the team with technical problem-solving and debugging.
• Set coding standards and lead by example through clean, maintainable code.

Code Reviews and Quality

• Review pull requests for quality, performance, security, and maintainability.
• Ensure code reviews are consistent, constructive, and completed on time.
• Enforce engineering best practices, including documentation, testing, version control, and deployment discipline.
• Improve code quality by reducing technical debt and promoting reusable components.
• Ensure proper unit testing, integration testing, and QA collaboration before release.

Team Management

• Manage, mentor, and guide software engineers across frontend, backend, QA, and related technical functions.
• Assign work based on skills, priorities, and delivery timelines.
• Conduct regular one-on-ones, performance reviews, and feedback sessions.
• Help engineers improve their technical skills, ownership, communication, and delivery discipline.
• Build a culture of accountability, learning, collaboration, and quality.

Project Delivery

• Work closely with product, QA, design, and business teams to convert requirements into technical execution plans.
• Break down product requirements into clear engineering tasks.
• Estimate effort, manage sprint planning, and track delivery progress.
• Ensure timely delivery of features, bug fixes, enhancements, and releases.
• Communicate delays, risks, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly to leadership.

Engineering Process Improvement

• Improve sprint planning, code review, release management, documentation, and QA handoff processes.
• Define and track engineering productivity and quality metrics.
• Ensure proper use of tools such as Jira, GitHub/GitLab, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring tools, and documentation systems.
• Create repeatable processes for development, testing, deployment, and production support.
• Promote better engineering discipline without slowing down startup speed.

Product and Business Alignment

• Understand customer requirements and product priorities.
• Help the team build features that solve real business problems, not just technical tasks.
• Collaborate with leadership on roadmap feasibility, sequencing, and technical trade-offs.
• Provide input on build-versus-buy decisions, integrations, scalability, and platform direction.

Required Skills and Experience

• 6+ years of software engineering experience.
• 2+ years of experience managing or leading an engineering team.
• Strong hands-on coding experience in modern web application development.
• Experience with frontend and backend development.
• Strong understanding of APIs, databases, system architecture, security, and cloud deployment.
• Experience conducting code reviews and improving engineering quality.
• Ability to manage developers while still contributing technically.
• Strong debugging, problem-solving, and decision-making skills.
• Experience working in a startup or fast-moving product environment.
• Good communication skills and ability to work with product, QA, leadership, and customer-facing teams.

Preferred Technical Skills

• MERN stack experience: MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, Node.js.
• TypeScript and JavaScript experience.
• Experience with AWS or similar cloud platforms.
• Experience with REST APIs, authentication, RBAC, and application security.
• Experience with CI/CD, Git workflows, automated testing, and release management.
• Familiarity with SaaS platforms, HRMS, PSA, ERP, finance, payroll, or workflow-based business applications is a plus.

Success Measures

The Technical Engineering Manager will be successful if they are able to:

• Improve code quality and reduce recurring defects.
• Ensure timely and predictable product delivery.
• Build a disciplined engineering culture.
• Mentor developers and improve team capability.
• Review and guide technical architecture effectively.
• Balance speed with quality, scalability, and maintainability.
• Keep the engineering team aligned with product and business goals.

Ideal Candidate

The ideal candidate is a strong technical leader who enjoys building products, solving complex problems, mentoring engineers, and improving engineering execution. They should be hands-on enough to code and review technical work, but mature enough to manage people, timelines, quality, and delivery expectations.

This person should be comfortable working in a startup environment where priorities can change, ownership matters, and practical execution is as important as technical depth.