Lead Software Engineer (Player-Coach) - Node.js/React.js - AI-Native Teams

The Opportunity: Your Next Big Leap

As a Lead Software Engineer, you will lead one of our 5 product engineering teams as a people leader and technically credible player-coach. Accountable for your team’s delivery, technical quality, production ownership, and growth, you will partner closely with Product and Design. You will stay close to the code, the customer problem, and operational reality.

You will initially lead a core product engineering team (e.g., our Policy Management Platform or another strategic domain). You’ll help power embedded insurance experiences used by top global brands.

Lead the Charge: AI-Assisted Engineering

Turn AI into a competitive edge by championing the pragmatic integration of AI tools. You will identify high-impact applications for coding agents, define clear guardrails, and mentor engineers to ensure human accountability for security and quality remains paramount.

• Cultivate a thoughtful AI culture: Use agents intentionally for implementation, debugging, and documentation.
• Establish responsible guardrails: Maintain rigorous human review, testing, and ownership of AI-generated output. Manage data sensitivity.
• Coach for excellence: Emphasize strong technical specs and recognize when human judgment outweighs automation.
• Measure what matters: Focus on outcomes like reduced toil and improved delivery flow over simply tracking tool adoption.
• Scale best practices: Collaborate with Principal and Platform engineers to refine reusable tooling across the organization.

Your Impact: What You’ll Do

You will own engineering outcomes end-to-end, contributing from discovery and technical design through implementation, deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

Foster Talent & Drive Delivery

• Champion team execution: Partner with the PM to turn priorities into realistic plans with a predictable, high-quality shipping cadence.
• Cultivate engineering growth: Mentor and develop your team through consistent feedback, performance management, and dedicated coaching.
• Build a high-trust culture: Promote psychological safety and accountability.
• Collaborative leadership: Work with fellow Engineering Leads to optimize cross-team workflows without unnecessary bureaucracy.

Stay Rooted in Technical Excellence

• Player-coach mentality: Engage with the codebase for credible technical guidance-participating in designs, reviews, and incident resolution.
• Elevate the quality bar: Own standards for code quality, automated testing, security, observability, and maintainability.
• Operational Resilience: Run and iterate on what you build, leading blameless post-mortems and fixing recurring debt.
• Pragmatic decision-making: Balance speed, security, and technical debt to deliver maximum product value.
• Leverage expertise: Partner with Principal Engineers on complex missions while keeping daily technical ownership within your team.

Bridge Product and Engineering

• Strategic partnership: Act as the PM's technical counterpart, collaborating on scoping and sequencing to prevent delivery surprises.
• Meaningful discovery: Provide technical perspective to translate vague requirements into robust software solutions.
• Design alignment: Explicitly discuss usability and technical feasibility trade-offs with Designers.
• Transparent communication: Articulate technical trade-offs to stakeholders, justifying decisions with a focus on practical outcomes.

Optimize the Ecosystem

• Eliminate friction: Reduce operational toil, recurring bugs, and unnecessary hand-offs.
• Champion shared tooling: Integrate shared platform capabilities and security best practices.
• Empower autonomy: Help engineers become confident decision-makers, reducing reliance on any single individual.

Your Arsenal: The Skills You Bring

• Technical leadership and depth: 7+ years building and operating production systems. Strong engineering fundamentals. Hands-on enough to guide design, review code, and solve complex problems. Qover’s platform relies on TypeScript, Node.js, React, and MongoDB, but we welcome leaders from ecosystems like Java, C#, Go, or Python. Experience with distributed systems and API design is key.
• Engineering ownership: Responsibility for quality, security, maintainability, and operability. You provide high-signal code reviews.
• Delivery foundations: Experience with RESTful APIs, 3rd-party integrations, data consistency, Git workflows, CI/CD, and automated deployments.
• Cloud and operations: Experience with cloud environments (GCP preferred). Docker/Kubernetes familiarity is a plus. Comfortable improving observability and incident response.
• People leadership: Experience managing, coaching, and developing engineers. Able to create clarity and give direct feedback.
• Product partnership: Skilled at working with stakeholders to make pragmatic trade-offs on scope, risk, and delivery.
• AI-native engineering leadership: Hands-on experience using coding agents/AI tools to improve throughput and quality. Accountable for responsible adoption, defining workflows, and measuring value without compromising human oversight.
• Domain experience: Experience in insurance, fintech, or another regulated domain is a strong advantage.

What Success Looks Like

• Reliable delivery: Roadmap goals translate into results through transparent sequencing and reduced delivery surprises.
• Team growth and engagement: High engagement and trust empower engineers; performance coaching resolves talent challenges.
• System resilience: Measurable upward trend in quality/stability, with fewer recurring defects and reduced friction.
• Product-engineering partnership: Unified team making collaborative trade-offs instead of rigid hand-offs.
• Effective AI-assisted engineering: Pragmatic adoption of AI tools that accelerates development speed without compromising human-led standards.

The Vibe: Who You Are

• The pragmatic player-coach: Cares about clean code and healthy practices; knows when to prioritize shipping and learning.
• The adaptable explorer: Comfortable in a scale-up with shifting priorities. Actively uses AI-assisted engineering where it creates value.
• The communicator: Communicates clearly, asks good questions, and collaborates well across functions.
• The fun co-worker: Constructive, kind, and collaborative. Enjoys mentoring and sharing knowledge.