{"id":1021574,"url":"https://alion.io/job/spare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team","title":"Software Development Team Lead, Infrastructure Platform Team","company":{"id":179775,"name":"Spare Labs","domain":"spare.com","url":"https://alion.io/company/spare-labs","size_band":"11-50","is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":"Ashby","truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"hybrid","remote_scope":null,"remote_scope_basis":null,"remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"structured","locations":["Vancouver, Canada"],"countries":["CA"],"hiring_countries":[],"hiring_countries_total":0,"salary":{"min":150000,"max":260000,"currency":"CAD","period":"year","gross":null,"usd_annual":182462},"salary_estimate":null,"experience_years_min":7,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":true,"technologies":[{"name":"Agentic Workflows","optional":false},{"name":"Agile","optional":false},{"name":"AI Agents","optional":false},{"name":"FinOps","optional":false},{"name":"GCP","optional":false},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":false},{"name":"Platform Engineering","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"Terraform","optional":false},{"name":"AIOps","optional":true},{"name":"CI/CD","optional":true},{"name":"LLM","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-09-18T00:06:47Z","employer_posted_date":"2026-09-18","last_verified_at":"2026-10-14T22:11:05Z","board_verified":true,"closed_at":null,"days_open":26,"trust":{"level":"ok","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":26},"description":"About Us\nSpare is a fast-growing, successful startup. We thrive on innovation, rapid execution, and delivering top-tier products that make a real impact in the transit industry. We are now seeking a Software Development Team Lead to join our Infrastructure Platform Team and help build and operate the cloud platform that every Spare product runs on.\nAbout This Role\nAs leader of the team responsible for Spare's core infrastructure platform, you will play a critical role in designing and building the reliable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation that powers our customers' on-demand transit systems. Working closely with others on the team, you will own the correct and efficient operation of the platform across a variety of real-world production scenarios.\nIn this role, you'll split your time 50/50 between hands-on technical contribution and people leadership, working in an autonomous environment where you'll solve interesting technical challenges while growing and mentoring a high-performing team. Currently there are four software developers reporting to this role.\nGiven the nature of our business, this role requires someone who can balance technical expertise with strong product sensibilities, creating solutions that are both technically sound and accessible to end users. The role includes some travel as part of the job responsibilities - specifically, up to four customer site visits per year to gain firsthand insights, plus participation in our biannual software development hackathons in Vancouver.\nKey Responsibilities\nOwn the design and development of core infrastructure platform capabilities from inception to launch\n\nBuild and evolve tooling, automation, and platform services that make every engineering team at Spare faster and safer\n\nArchitect and implement high-performance, scalable distributed systems on GCP and Kubernetes\n\nDrive improvements in cluster reliability, application resilience, and internal access security\n\nOperate and maintain Spare's Redis and PostgreSQL databases - availability, performance tuning, scaling, upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery\n\nDrive Spare toward AI SRE practices - embed AI agents into incident detection, alert triage, and operational workflows to make reliability work faster and more proactive\n\nManage and continuously improve the SRE on-call rotation - healthy schedules, clear escalation paths, and blameless post-mortems that turn incidents into systemic improvements\n\nDrive FinOps practices across the organization - own cloud spend visibility, right-sizing, and cost optimization initiatives that deliver measurable savings\n\nUse AI agentic tooling daily to accelerate your own and your team's engineering output, and coach the team to do the same\n\nActively mentor software developers of all levels and uplift team capacity\n\nCollaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and other software developers\n\nEnsure 99.99% uptime and maintain exceptional system performance\n\nParticipate in team agile rituals and help improve software development processes\n\nWho You Are\nA highly productive software developer with a proven track record of delivering high-quality code in complex environments\n\nHighly proficient with modern AI development tools and agentic workflows - you use AI to move faster and think better, not as a crutch\n\nA passionate mentor and technical leader who enjoys helping others grow\n\nPassionate about distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering\n\nCost-conscious by default - you treat cloud spend as an engineering problem and know how to deliver savings without sacrificing reliability\n\nAdept at balancing reliability and security rigor with practical developer-experience constraints\n\nRequirements\n7+ years of software development experience, with at least 2+ years in a people leadership role\n\nExpert in backend technologies with strong distributed systems experience\n\nDemonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows (AI coding agents, automation of engineering and operational tasks)\n\nExperience operating systems at scale with a strong reliability and uptime mindset\n\nExperience running or managing an SRE on-call rotation, including incident response and post-mortem culture\n\nDeep experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)\n\nExperience driving cloud cost optimization and FinOps initiatives - right-sizing, spend visibility, and measurable cost savings\n\nExperience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tooling (Terraform)\n\nUnderstanding of security best practices, especially around internal access control and container security\n\nDemonstrated success in managing a team of software developers, with a focus on team and individual performance\n\nDemonstrated ability to mentor other developers and provide technical leadership\n\nStrong problem-solving, debugging, and system design skills\n\nExcellent communication and collaboration skills\n\nIt will be considered a plus (nice-to-have):\nExperience in the transit industry or another real-time, safety-critical domain\n\nExperience building internal developer platforms and golden-path tooling\n\nExperience applying AI/LLM tooling to SRE or infrastructure operations (AIOps, automated incident triage)\n\nExperience with CI/CD systems at scale, including test sharding and build performance\n\nExperience operating and maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis in production - performance tuning, indexing, replication, backup and restore\n\nDon't meet every single requirement?\nStudies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification in the job posting.\nAt Spare, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment so we strongly encourage you to apply even if you don't believe you meet every single qualification outlined. We also do our best to respond to all applications we receive.\nAbout the Infrastructure Platform Team\nThe Infrastructure Platform Team's job is to build and run the foundation that Spare's on-demand transportation platform depends on - where circumstances change in real time and downtime is not an option. Primarily this involves keeping our Kubernetes clusters reliable and secure, hardening our application resilience, driving cloud cost efficiency, and making sure our distributed systems can handle real-time updates efficiently.\nWhy Join Us?\nWork on challenging technical problems with real-world impact in the transportation industry\n\nA fast-paced, high-impact role in a rapidly growing startup\n\nThe opportunity to take ownership of core systems and drive innovation\n\nA dynamic, collaborative, and supportive team culture\n\nCompetitive salary and equity options\n\nIf you are ready to tackle complex routing and optimization challenges and thrive in a high-performance environment, we'd love to hear from you!","description_format":"text","description_chars":6884,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":7,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":["Equity"],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Canada","iso":"CA","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Scheduling & Booking Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-09-18T06:44:35Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":39,"band":"fade","label":"Fading","p_open":1,"p_active":0.701,"p_room":0.55,"age_days":26,"expected_fill_days":26,"reasons":["conf:4","velocity","win:tail"],"computed_at":"2026-10-14T06:34:16Z"},"pay":{"stated_usd_annual":182462,"is_top_pay":false},"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/spare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/spare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-10-14T22:48:46Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":30859,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-10-15T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":179775},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=179775"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Fspare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Fspare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Fspare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/spare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Fspare-labs-software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team"}]}