Engineering
Lead Engineer
Own the architecture and delivery of one client platform end to end, with a pod of four to six engineers reporting into your technical decisions.
Send us something you have built. A senior engineer reads every application.
About the role
This is the most senior individual contributor role on a project. You run the architecture sprint, you write the decision records, you make the calls that are expensive to reverse, and you stay on the project through launch and into operation.
You will write code most days. This is not a role where you draw diagrams and hand them to someone else. Roughly sixty percent of your week is hands on, and the rest is design, review and the client conversations that make the design possible.
The pod reports into your technical decisions and into a delivery lead for scheduling. You are accountable for whether the system works, not for whether tickets closed.
Ownership
What you will own
- Run the two week architecture sprint: domain model, options with costed trade offs, risk register and a deployed walking skeleton
- Own the architecture decision records and defend them in front of a client CTO
- Write production code alongside the pod, and review most of what the pod writes
- Set the testing, observability and release strategy in the first month, not in a hardening phase later
- Be the technical voice in client conversations, including the ones where the honest answer is that they should not build the thing
- Grow two or three engineers a level through pairing and review rather than through a mentoring programme
- Carry the on call pager in rotation for the system you built
Requirements
What we need from you
- Seven or more years building software that reached production and stayed there
- You have designed a system from an empty repository and lived with that design for at least two years afterwards
- Deep competence in at least one of TypeScript, Go or Python, and enough range to read the others
- Relational data modelling you can defend, including the parts you got wrong before
- You have run a real incident: found the cause, fixed it, wrote it up honestly
- You can say no to a client, in the room, with a reason they accept
- Written English strong enough that your design documents do not need editing
Bonus
Useful, not required
- Experience in a regulated domain: healthcare, payments or anything with an auditor attached
- You have migrated a live system with no downtime and can describe how
- Cloud cost work, or any evidence that you treat someone else's budget as if it were yours
- Production experience with language model systems, particularly evaluation rather than prompting
- You have hired and onboarded engineers, and have opinions about how it usually goes wrong
Hiring
Four steps, about two weeks
We tell you where you stand after every step. If we say no, we say why. No unpaid take home marathons and no whiteboard algorithm theatre.
Written application
Send something you have built and a few lines on what you want to work on next. A senior engineer reads it. You hear back within five working days.
5 daysConversation
Forty five minutes with the person who would work alongside you. What you have built, what went wrong on it, what you would do differently.
45 minWork session
Three hours on a real problem from our backlog, worked through together rather than alone. We are watching how you think, not whether you memorised an algorithm.
3 hrsOffer
Numbers, band and scope in writing within two working days. We do not make exploding offers and we do not pressure you to decide on a call.
2 daysApply
Interested in this role?
Send us something you have built and a few lines on why this role. No cover letter template, no form with eleven fields. A senior engineer reads it and you hear back within five working days either way.
Questions before you apply? Write to contact@altuslabshq.com and ask. We answer those too.
Kathmandu · GMT +5:45