This is a remote position.
The Product Lead Engineer serves as the technical authority across multiple Agile scrum teams inside a vertical product. This role carries no personnel management responsibilities but holds the highest technical voice within the team — setting direction, making implementation calls, and ensuring the team delivers reliable, well-engineered software. Beyond their own contributions, the Product Lead Engineer's output raises the technical capability of everyone around them.
Core Responsibilities
Technical Team Leadership
- Serve as the technical authority within the development teams — making implementation decisions, resolving technical disagreements, and ensuring the team operates to a consistently high engineering standard.
- Lead end-to-end delivery of complex features across backend, frontend, and mobile platforms — from design through deployment and monitoring — while actively guiding teammates through their portions of the work.
- Decompose ambiguous requirements into well-scoped tasks; proactively identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability risks.
- Regularly and actively contribute production code (player-coach role) as a consistent, high-quality committer who models the engineering standards the rest of the organization is held to.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
- Conduct thorough, constructive code reviews that improve quality and accelerate the growth of junior engineers.
- Mentor Software Engineers through pairing, design discussions, and regular technical guidance.
- Drive best practices for testing, branching, documentation, and security within the team.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Collaborate with Product, QA, and Customer Success to clarify requirements, estimate accurately, and deliver reliable features on schedule.
- Communicate clearly and proactively about technical risks, progress, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Technical Ownership & Cross-Training
- Take primary ownership of one or more significant product areas — maintaining deep expertise in their architecture, behavior, and failure modes — and serve as the authoritative resource for decisions and issues in those areas.
- Proactively lead knowledge transfer of owned areas to teammates so the team can operate effectively without any single engineer becoming a bottleneck.
- Actively participate in cross-training led by others, developing meaningful familiarity with product areas outside primary ownership to strengthen overall team resilience.
Required Qualifications
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
- 5+ years of professional software development experience, including production SaaS environments.
- Deep proficiency in PHP and JavaScript / React, including design patterns, performance, and security best practices.
- Strong command of relational database design, SQL optimization, and data modeling (MySQL / MariaDB).
- Demonstrated ability to mentor and upskill less experienced engineers.
- Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering tooling and workflows.
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