Tech Lead Manager

About the Role

The Tech Lead Manager (TLM) for the Platform squad at Super Dispatch is a hybrid leadership role that combines deep technical ownership with people management. Unlike a traditional Engineering Manager role, this position requires you to be the primary technical authority for our platform infrastructure - the person who makes architecture decisions, leads incident response, and directly contributes to critical platform systems.

The Platform squad owns the foundation that all product squads build on: infrastructure (GCP, Kubernetes, CloudSQL, RabbitMQ, Elasticsearch), CI/CD pipelines, observability (Datadog), identity and authentication services, security controls, and developer experience tooling. With a team of ~4-5 engineers, this role demands someone who can personally drive technical direction while growing and managing the team.

You will report to the CTO and collaborate closely with Engineering Managers across all product squads, as well as Security, Analytics, and Customer Support teams.

What You’ll Do

Your work will split roughly 60% technical leadership / 40% people management, though this will shift based on team and organizational needs.

You will own platform architecture and technical direction.

- Own the technical roadmap for the Platform squad, including infrastructure modernization, reliability improvements, and cost optimization.

- Make and document architecture decisions (ADRs) that affect the entire engineering organization - service decomposition, API contracts, database strategies, and infrastructure patterns.

- Design and implement cross-cutting platform capabilities: identity/auth services, observability pipelines, deployment infrastructure, and security controls.

- Drive API-first design practices across services, including OpenAPI specifications and generated client libraries for Go, Python, and Java consumers.

- Evaluate and adopt new technologies and tools (e.g., transitioning observability to Datadog, implementing row-level security in databases, adopting infrastructure-as-code with Terraform).

- Lead cost analysis and optimization of cloud infrastructure.

- Be the go-to technical escalation point for platform-related questions from all product squads.

You will lead incidents and ensure platform reliability.

- Own incident response for platform-level outages (SEV-0/SEV-1), coordinating across squads to restore service.

- Define and maintain runbooks, monitoring alerts, and escalation procedures.

- Conduct post-incident reviews and drive follow-up action items to prevent recurrence.

- Set and track platform reliability metrics (uptime, latency percentiles, deployment frequency, MTTR).

- Design and implement resilience patterns: circuit breakers, graceful degradation, database failover strategies.

You will be hands-on in code and infrastructure.

- Contribute directly to platform services - writing production code in Python, Go, or other languages as needed.

- Review code and architecture proposals from platform engineers and cross-squad contributions to shared infrastructure.

- Manage deployment configurations (Kubernetes manifests, Helm charts, ArgoCD), secrets management (Vault, 1Password), and CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions).

- Set high standards for coding, testing, deployment, and monitoring practices within the squad and across the organization.

You will manage and grow the platform team.

- Manage a team of ~4-5 platform engineers with regular 1:1s, career development conversations, and performance reviews.

- Coach engineers on both technical depth and breadth - helping backend engineers grow into infrastructure and reliability expertise.

- Identify hiring needs and technical skill gaps; lead recruiting efforts for the platform squad.

- Onboard new team members effectively, building their context on a complex, cross-cutting codebase.

- Foster a collaborative culture where product squads feel supported (not blocked) by the platform team.

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