Technical Lead

About the Role:

Responsive is looking for a Technical Lead who combines strong technical expertise with leadership skills to drive complex projects and mentor a team of engineers. In this role, you will take ownership of architecting scalable solutions, optimizing system performance, and ensuring engineering excellence.

You will lead the development of enterprise applications and intelligent product capabilities using Java, React, Large Language Models (LLMs), Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AI Agents, and modern search technologies. You will guide technical decisions and translate product requirements into reliable, secure, and maintainable solutions in a fast-paced SaaS environment.

We welcome candidates who thrive on ownership and accountability and are driven to deliver results and make a meaningful impact.

What You'll Be Doing:

• Technical Leadership & Mentorship: Guide a team of engineers, provide technical direction, conduct design and code reviews, and establish best practices for high-quality software development.
• Solution Architecture & Design: Own the architecture and design of complex, distributed systems, ensuring scalability, reliability, security, and performance. Document key technical decisions and trade-offs.
• Hands-On Development: Actively participate in coding, code reviews, and debugging critical issues while promoting clean, maintainable, and testable code.
• Full-Stack Development: Design and develop robust backend solutions in Java and Spring Boot while ensuring a seamless and efficient React-based frontend experience.
• AI-Powered Application Development: Lead the design, implementation, and production delivery of capabilities using LLMs, RAG architectures, AI Agents, and workflow automation.
• Search & Retrieval: Design and optimize pipelines for document ingestion, chunking, embeddings, indexing, vector search, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, reranking, and context construction.
• Agentic Workflows: Build workflows involving tool/function calling, orchestration, external APIs, and multi-step execution, with appropriate permissions, error handling, and execution controls.
• Performance & Cost Optimization: Identify and resolve system bottlenecks, ensuring efficient resource utilization, low-latency responses, and effective management of infrastructure and LLM usage costs.
• Quality & AI Evaluation: Establish automated testing and evaluation practices for application behavior, retrieval relevance, response accuracy, grounding, and agent task completion.
• Production Reliability & Security: Drive observability, incident resolution, and root-cause analysis. Ensure secure data handling, access control, and tenant isolation across application and AI workflows.
• Technical Delivery Ownership: Translate product requirements into technical plans, break down complex initiatives, manage dependencies and risks, and guide delivery from design through deployment.
• Cross-Team Collaboration: Work closely with product managers, designers, and geographically distributed engineering teams to align technical solutions with business goals.
• Continuous Innovation: Evaluate emerging technologies through research and prototyping, and guide adoption based on product value, technical fit, and operational readiness.

What We're Looking For:

Education

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related field.

Experience

• 8+ years of experience in software development, including designing and building large-scale distributed systems.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical delivery, mentoring engineers, and owning architectural decisions.
• Hands-on experience designing and implementing AI-powered applications using LLMs, RAG architectures, AI Agents, or workflow automation.

Skills, Qualifications & Ability:

• Strong hands-on skills in Java, Spring Boot, React, and MongoDB.
• Experience building scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant APIs and enterprise SaaS applications.
• Practical experience developing and deploying solutions using LLMs, RAG, AI agents, or workflow automation.
• Knowledge of search and retrieval technologies, including Elasticsearch/Solr, vector search, semantic search, hybrid retrieval, and reranking.
• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, Azure, or GCP, including containers, deployment, monitoring, and CI/CD.
• Strong understanding of software testing, performance optimization, production support, and root-cause analysis.
• Knowledge of enterprise security, including authentication, authorization, data protection, tenant isolation, and secure AI tool usage.
• Strong communication and collaboration skills with both technical and nontechnical stakeholders.
• Experience working in Agile environments, with familiarity with Scrum and Jira.
• Ability to balance hands-on coding, technical decision-making, delivery priorities, and technical debt.

What Can Help You Stand Out:

• Experience taking RAG or AI Agent applications from prototype to production, with measurable improvements in quality, latency, adoption, or cost.
• Familiarity with GenAI frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Semantic Kernel, or Spring AI.
• Experience with NLP, information retrieval, and AI-powered search.
• Experience building multi-tenant enterprise SaaS applications with secure, permission-aware access to customer data.
• Experience creating reusable platform capabilities or engineering standards adopted across teams.