Scala Tech Lead

Svitla Systems Inc. is looking for a Scala Tech Lead for a full-time on-site position (40 hours per week) in Ukraine. Our client is a finance company and an alternative lending platform focused on providing capital access to small and medium-sized businesses.

You'll head the engineering team on a fintech client engagement. The role combines hands-on Scala development with team management and client-side communication. The Team Lead is accountable for delivery quality, team health, and alignment with the client’s engineering and product teams at every stage of the project.

Time zone: U.S. Eastern Time (ET)

Requirements

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field.
• 7+ years of commercial experience in backend development with Scala and/or Java.
• 3+ years of experience in a tech lead/staff engineering role.
• Proven experience leading engineering teams in a client-facing or staff augmentation context.
• In-depth understanding of data structures, algorithms, parallelization, and performance optimization.
• Knowledge of RabbitMQ; familiarity with other message brokers, such as Kafka, is valued.
• Knowledge of PostgreSQL or comparable relational databases.
• Strong commercial experience with AWS.
• Experience working in an Agile environment.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills.

Will be a plus

• Knowledge of Heroku.
• Experience with Python.
• Background in fintech or financial services is a strong plus.

Responsibilities

Technical leadership

• Lead technical design and implementation across the Scala backend and React frontend.
• Remain hands-on in development, with a stronger backend focus when needed.
• Define architecture for new features, services, and integrations.
• Establish coding standards and engineering best practices.
• Lead code reviews and support the team with complex technical issues.
• Ensure system performance, scalability, reliability, and security.
• Evaluate libraries, frameworks, and technical solutions together with the client’s engineering team.

Team leadership

• Lead, mentor, and support the engineering team.
• Maintain clear priorities and consistent delivery quality.
• Facilitate stand-ups, planning, refinement, and retrospectives.
• Identify delivery risks, dependencies, workload, and capacity issues.
• Support onboarding and knowledge sharing across the team.

Client collaboration

• Act as the primary technical point of contact for the client’s engineering and product teams.
• Communicate technical risks, blockers, dependencies, and trade-offs clearly.
• Participate in planning sessions, discovery workshops, technical discussions, and sprint reviews.
• Translate business requirements into technical tasks and implementation plans.
• Align key architectural and technical decisions with the client’s engineering team.