Technical Lead

At FourKites we have the opportunity to tackle complex challenges with real-world impacts. Whether it’s medical supplies from Cardinal Health or groceries for Walmart, the FourKites platform helps customers operate global supply chains that are efficient, agile and sustainable.

Join a team of curious problem solvers that celebrates differences, leads with empathy and values inclusivity . 

We are hiring Technical Lead for the most data-intensive parts of our platform: Ocean Visibility and/or Order Inventory Visibility (OV/IV).

Select which domain you are drawn to, or let us help you pick.

As a Technical Lead you are the engineering owner of your team’s delivery. You are accountable for what ships, when it ships and how well it is built. You set the technical direction, you hold the bar on engineering practices, and you stay hands-on in the code - typically 40-60% of your week. This is explicitly not a people management role. You will not own headcount, performance reviews, compensation or career ladders - your Engineering Manager does. You own the technical and delivery outcome of the team, and the Engineering Manager owns the people. You operate

Who you are:

• 8+ years building and operating production software, including 2+ years as a tech lead, staff engineer or equivalent leading a team’s technical delivery.

  • Deep backend expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Go, with strong fundamentals in distributed systems and object-oriented design.
  • Hands-on experience designing microservices and event-driven systems - Kafka or similar - including idempotency, ordering, replay and failure handling.
  • Strong data modelling and SQL skills on PostgreSQL (or equivalent), plus practical experience with caching (Redis) and query/performance tuning at scale.
  • Production experience on AWS with containerised deployments, CI/CD and modern observability tooling.
  • A track record of shipping complex, multi-quarter work on time - and of being the person who found the risk early.
  • Demonstrated ability to lift a team’s engineering practices, not just your own output, through standards, review and mentorship.
  • Excellent written and verbal communication - you can write a design doc an executive and a junior engineer both understand.
  • Comfortable with influence rather than authority: you get the team to a better answer without owning anyone’s performance review.
  • Fluent in Agile delivery and the tooling around it (Jira, Confluence, Git branching and rebasing).
  • Comfortable working with a distributed US-India team and with customers directly.

What you’ll be doing:

• Own delivery

  • Own the end-to-end technical delivery of your team’s roadmap - from breaking down an epic into sequenced, atomic units of work through to production release.
  • Partner with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager to shape scope, sequence work realistically and say no to the things that will not fit.
  • Run sprint-level execution: identify risk early, surface and clear blockers, and keep commitments honest and predictable.
  • Be the single technical point of accountability when a release slips, a migration goes sideways or a customer escalation lands on the team.
  • Drive production health for your services - SLOs, on-call quality, alert hygiene, and root-cause follow-through rather than repeat firefighting.

  Set technical direction

  • Own the architecture of your domain: service boundaries, data models, event contracts and integration patterns, aligned with the FourKites North Star architecture.
  • Write and review design documents; make the calls that need making and document the trade-offs behind them.
  • Evaluate frameworks, tools and third-party/partner APIs; decide what we build, what we buy and what we integrate.
  • Maintain a live view of technical debt in your domain and negotiate a steady share of roadmap capacity to pay it down.
  • Design for the scale we actually run at - millions of supply chain events a day, across 80+ countries and 1,600+ global brands.

  Hold the engineering bar for the whole team

  • Define and enforce the team’s engineering standards: coding conventions, test strategy and coverage expectations, PR size and review turnaround, branching, observability and documentation.
  • Review code with intent - catch design problems, not just style - and keep review latency low so the team stays unblocked.
  • Make quality measurable. Watch and improve the signals that matter: change failure rate, revert and hotfix rate, escaped defects, MTTR, cycle time from first commit to production.
  • Raise the floor, not just the ceiling: make sure best practices hold across every engineer on the team, including the newest one.
  • Champion secure-by-default and well-instrumented software - tests, tracing, metrics and alerts are part of done, not a follow-up ticket.

  Multiply the team

  • Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review - technical growth, with career growth left to the Engineering Manager.
  • Give the EM and PM a clear, unvarnished read on the team’s technical capability and delivery risk.
  • Onboard new engineers into the domain quickly, and keep the domain knowledge written down rather than resident in one head.
  • Participate in hiring as a technical interviewer and calibrate the bar for your domain.

  Work across the org

  • Translate between engineering and the rest of the business - Product, Implementation, Customer Engineering, Support and, when needed, the customer.
  • Coordinate with tech leads in adjacent domains (OTR, Appointment Manager, Platform, AI Agents) on shared contracts and cross-team dependencies.
  • Represent your domain in architecture reviews and platform-level decisions.

  Education Qualification: Graduate from B.E/ B.Tech / MCA / M.Tech Background.

Bonus points:

For the Ocean Visibility 

• Experience with ocean and multimodal logistics data - container and booking milestones, bills of lading, carrier and NVOCC feeds, terminal and port data, AIS/vessel tracking, customs events.
• Familiarity with logistics integration standards and partner ecosystems (EDI/EDIFACT, X12, DCSA APIs, INTTRA, CargoSmart, freight forwarder and carrier APIs).
• Experience reconciling messy, late, duplicated or conflicting third-party data into a single trustworthy source of truth - and building the ETA and exception logic on top of it.

For the Order Inventory Visibility role

• Experience modelling orders, purchase orders, line items, SKUs and inventory positions - including order-to- shipment and shipment-to-order stitching at high cardinality.
• Integration experience with enterprise systems of record: SAP, Oracle, other ERPs, OMS, WMS and TMS platforms, over APIs, flat files and EDI.
• Experience building a real-time digital twin over order and inventory data, including OTIF, fill-rate and inventory- in-motion analytics.

For both

• Prior work in supply chain, logistics or another high-volume B2B enterprise SaaS domain.
• Experience leading a large-scale migration, re-platforming or domain decomposition.
• Practical use of AI coding tools to raise team throughput without lowering the quality bar.
• Experience in a high-growth product organisation with enterprise customers.

Who we are:

FourKites, the leader in AI-driven supply chain transformation for global enterprises and pioneer of real-time visibility, turns supply chain data into automated action. FourKites Intelligent Control Tower® breaks down enterprise silos by

creating a real-time digital twin of orders, shipments, inventory and assets. This comprehensive view, combined with AI-powered digital workers, enables companies to prevent disruptions, automate routine tasks and optimize performance across their supply chain. FourKites processes over 3.2 million supply chain events daily - from purchase orders to final delivery - helping 1,600-plus global brands prevent disruptions, make faster decisions and move from

reactive tracking to proactive supply chain orchestration. For more information, visit www.fourkites.com. FourKites provides competitive compensation with stock options, outstanding benefits and a collaborative culture for all employees around the globe. To help you be your best, we have 5 global recharge days, in addition to generous PTO and standard holidays. Parental leave for all parents, an annual wellness stipend and volunteer days also provide you with time and resources for self care and to care for others.

Benefits 

• Medical benefits start on first day of employment
• 36 PTO days( Sick, Casual and Earned) , 5 recharge days, 2 volunteer days 
• Home Office setups and Technology reimbursement
• Lifestyle & Family benefits 
• Annual Swags/ Festive Swags
• Ongoing learning & development opportunities ( Professional development program, Toast Master club etc.)