Tech Lead - SDE

We are looking for a Tech Lead SDE to drive technical excellence and delivery for a key engineering team at LTCV Credit. This role is for someone who is a strong individual contributor at heart, but who has begun to derive as much satisfaction from multiplying the output of a team as from writing elegant code themselves. You will own the technical direction of your squad, lead architectural decisions, and be the primary bridge between your team and the broader engineering and product organisation. You will partner closely with your Engineering Manager to define and execute the engineering roadmap, manage cross-functional dependencies, and elevate the technical bar of everyone around you. You will set standards, resolve ambiguity, and ensure the team consistently ships high-quality, scalable, and maintainable software.

Critically, this role is designed for someone with a clear inclination toward people management. You are someone who invests in your team's growth, conducts meaningful 1:1s, and aspires to be an Engineering Manager within the next 12-24 months. We will provide structured support, coaching, and progressive responsibility to help you get there.

Responsibilities:

• Own the technical roadmap for your team's product domain, aligning engineering plans with product goals, business priorities, and org-level architecture decisions.
• Lead system design and architectural reviews for complex, high-impact features, making clear, well-reasoned decisions on trade-offs between performance, scalability, reliability, and cost.
• Define and enforce engineering standards: coding conventions, design patterns, API contracts, and documentation practices.
• Proactively identify and address technical debt, prioritise remediation alongside feature delivery without compromising velocity.
• Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, and tools that meaningfully improve team productivity or product quality.
• Represent the team's technical perspective in cross-team architecture discussions, design councils, and platform strategy forums.
• Drive end-to-end delivery of large, complex features from requirements decomposition through design, implementation, testing, and production rollout.
• Break down ambitious product goals into well-scoped, executable engineering tasks; provide and validate accurate effort estimates.
• Remove technical blockers proactively, escalating to leadership and cross-functional partners when necessary to keep delivery on track.
• Own release quality for your team's codebase: establish and oversee code review standards, testing coverage expectations, and deployment practices.
• Manage technical scope creep and communicate risks and dependency changes early to product and engineering leadership.
• Contribute hands-on as a senior engineer: write production code, conduct impactful code reviews, and participate in on-call rotations.
• Conduct regular, structured 1:1s with team members, providing candid, constructive feedback and discussing career development goals proactively.
• Build and maintain individual development plans (IDPs) for each engineer on your team, aligned with their growth aspirations and team needs.
• Identify high-potential engineers and advocate for their recognition, promotion, and stretch opportunities.
• Foster a psychologically safe team environment where engineers feel empowered to voice ideas, challenge assumptions, and take calculated risks.
• Manage underperformance early, set clear expectations, provide coaching support, and escalate with context when needed.
• Contribute actively to SDET and SDE hiring: define role requirements, screen candidates, lead technical panels, and calibrate hiring decisions.
• Onboard new hires effectively with a structured 30/60/90-day plan and early ownership opportunities.
• Act as the technical point of contact for your squad, translating product requirements into engineering plans and surfacing technical risks to non-technical stakeholders clearly.
• Drive alignment between your team's engineering roadmap and those of dependent teams, proactively managing upstream and downstream dependencies.
• Collaborate with product managers during roadmap planning, sprint reviews, and backlog grooming to ensure engineering constraints and opportunities are well-understood.
• Partner with infrastructure, SRE, and data engineering teams on platform reliability, observability, and scaling requirements.
• Represent your team's work in engineering all-hands, product reviews, and leadership forums with clarity and confidence.
• Champion a culture of technical excellence, lead by example in code quality, documentation, testing, and engineering discipline.
• Drive adoption of best practices across your team: test-driven development, continuous integration, blue-green deployments, and observability-first design.
• Own incident response for your team's services, lead postmortems, produce blameless RCAs, and drive systemic improvements.
• Evangelise platform and tooling improvements that benefit not just your squad but the broader engineering organisation.
• Contribute to and improve the team's definition of done, sprint ceremonies, and engineering operating rhythms.
• Mentor SDE 1 SDE 2 and SDE 3 engineers supporting technical growth through code reviews, design feedback, pairing sessions, and regular guidance.
• Facilitate technical knowledge-sharing within and across teams: run internal tech talks, write architecture decision records (ADRs), and maintain living documentation.
• Actively contribute to the engineering blog, internal wikis, or open-source projects where appropriate.

Requirements:

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical field from a recognised institution.
• Minimum 7 years of professional software development experience in a product-based engineering organisation.
• At least 2-3 years in a senior or tech-lead SDE capacity with demonstrated ownership of system design and end-to-end feature delivery.
• Proven experience leading or closely mentoring a team of 4+ engineers, including conducting 1:1s, code reviews, and performance feedback.

Core Technical Skills:

• Expert-level proficiency in one or more of: Java, Go, Python, Kotlin, or JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js ).
• Strong system design skills: ability to design distributed systems, microservices architectures, event-driven systems, and APIs at scale.
• Deep understanding of databases, both relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis, MongoDB, Cassandra), including schema design, indexing, and query optimisation.
• Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) services such as EC2/GKE, S3 RDS, Kafka, SQS, Lambda, and IAM.
• Solid understanding of containerisation and orchestration: Docker and Kubernetes in production environments.
• Experience with RESTful API design, GraphQL, gRPC, and asynchronous messaging patterns.
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD) and Infrastructure-as-Code tools (Terraform, Helm).
• Strong understanding of observability: structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics using tools like Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, or New Relic.
• Familiarity with security best practices: OWASP Top 10 secrets management, service authentication (OAuth 2.0 JWT), and data encryption.
• Solid version control practices with Git; experience with trunk-based development or GitFlow branching strategies.