Team Leadership 

• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of 5–6 engineers across different levels. 

• Set clear performance expectations, run structured 1:1s, and own career development for your reports. 

• Build and maintain a high-trust, psychologically safe team culture. 

• Provide technical mentorship and coaching to help engineers grow in Java, cloud, and distributed systems. 

Delivery & Execution 

• Own the planning, prioritization, and on-time delivery of engineering commitments for your team. 

• Drive agile processes (sprint planning, retrospectives, estimation) without letting process become overhead. 

• Remove blockers, manage cross-team dependencies, and escalate risks early. 

• Hold the team accountable to quality, velocity, and reliability targets. 

• Translate business requirements into appropriate technical solutions, keeping simplicity at the core. 

Hands-On Technical Contributions 

• Conduct meaningful code reviews for Java-based backend services, ensuring quality, maintainability, and adherence to engineering standards. 

• Design and architect highly scalable, cloud-native enterprise software applications. 

• Work hands-on with Java, J2EE, Spring, REST APIs, and cloud platforms (AWS/Azure/GCP) to contribute to architecture and critical design decisions. 

• Guide the team in debugging complex distributed system issues across Kafka, MongoDB, and microservices. 

• Research, evaluate, and recommend technologies required for solution delivery. 

• Work closely with engineers to design solutions to security problems and monitor vulnerabilities in third-party components. 

• Maximise performance, uptime, and supportability of the product. 

Technical Strategy 

• Provide technical oversight across backend architecture, API design, and distributed systems. 

• Guide architectural decisions, code quality standards, and engineering best practices. 

• Partner with Principal and Lead engineers to define the long-term technical vision. 

• Ensure observability, security, performance, and reliability are treated as first-class concerns. 

• Champion DevOps and cloud infrastructure best practices across the team. 

Cross-Functional Partnership 

• Work closely with Product Management to define requirements and shape the roadmap. 

• Translate business goals into clear engineering scope and realistic timelines. 

• Collaborate and communicate with stakeholders, providing project progress updates and highlighting risks with mitigation plans. 

• Interface with customer-facing functions to gather requirements and perform technical due diligence.