Lead Python Engineer

📋 Role Overview
We’re looking for a Lead Python Engineer to join our team and support one of our US-based clients — a CRM and data intelligence platform for private-market investors.
You’ll run backend, data and AI as one function: lead a team of seven engineers who build the core platform, the data pipelines and the AI services, and set the technical direction for all three. You’ll report to the client’s VP of Engineering and work alongside the frontend, QA and DevOps leads. This is a hands-on leadership role — about half of your week will be technical work.
This is a full-time, long-term engagement with working hours of approximately 14:00–23:00 Kyiv time to overlap with U.S. Eastern business hours. Occasional out-of-hours incidents come with the role.

🧙‍♂️In this role, you will
Lead a team of seven backend, data and AI engineers across several time zones and own their planning, growth and delivery.
Merge backend and AI into one team with a single planning process, cross-train both sides, make AI delivery visible alongside everything else and grow an owner for each area.
Write design docs, make architecture calls, take on the hardest problems and take the first page when backend or AI breaks in production.
Own the backend platform architecture, database design and technology choices, pay down tech debt deliberately, and keep the platform reliable as customers and their data grow.
Define the canonical company model — how companies are identified and related, including entity resolution and search — and make sure customers can trust where every piece of data comes from.
Own enrichment pipelines and data partners for company, people and deal data, and catch quality gaps before customers do.
Put evaluation and quality controls around AI features so models and prompts can change safely, and own their accuracy, speed and cost.
Review tickets before they reach engineers, hold code review to a real standard and track defects per feature.
Make the engineering call on backend and AI incidents, drive blameless postmortems and keep a short, ranked tech-debt register tied to the roadmap.
Agree API contracts with frontend, shape scope with Product and explain the data layer clearly to customers and their security teams.


🎯You may be interested if
You want to own the core of a product end to end — backend, data and AI.
You are a hands-on leader who still enjoys building, not only managing.
You make decisions, write them down and see them through — and can disagree with a proposal without stalling it.
You’d rather build engineering practices that stick than inherit them, without slowing the team down.
You enjoy working with messy, real-world data and making it trustworthy.
You thrive in a remote work setup and appreciate autonomy in organizing your work.


👌 Role Requirements
8+ years of professional backend development experience with Python, including deep Django and PostgreSQL experience.
Strong relational data modeling and a record of sound architecture and technology choices on multi-tenant SaaS.
2+ years leading teams of 7+ engineers, with a record of growing people into owners.
Experience leading distributed teams across time zones, including engineers from engineering partners.
Hands-on experience shipping LLM features to real users (retrieval, extraction or agent workflows) and measuring them with evaluation sets.
Hands-on experience with entity resolution, record linkage or pipelines that reconcile conflicting data sources; clear understanding of data provenance.
Experience owning production incidents and on-call in your area.
Experience in a company with established engineering processes: you know which practices are worth keeping and can build them without slowing the team down.
Experience using AI-powered development tools, particularly Claude Code or similar coding agents, as part of the development workflow.
Clear communication: writing design docs and decisions for engineers, explaining trade-offs to product managers and walking customers and non-technical stakeholders through how the system works.
Advanced English (C1) or higher, including confident spoken and written communication.


Nice to have:
Familiarity with private equity, venture or company data from sources like PitchBook or Crunchbase.
Experience building and running production systems on Azure.
Experience building search that blends keyword and semantic retrieval across large datasets.
Experience with event streaming or orchestration (Kafka, Airflow) and data quality tooling (Great Expectations, Monte Carlo).
Experience with Python AI frameworks, agent tooling and the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Experience building email or calendar integrations at scale.


💻 Working Conditions
Employment Type: Full-Time
This is a fully remote position with the entire team across Ukraine.
Preferred working hours: approximately 14:00–23:00 (Kyiv time), aligned with U.S. Eastern business hours.
20 working days of paid vacation per year.
Financial compensation for completing certifications and encouraging continuous learning and professional development.
High-impact role with clear visibility — you’ll own the backend, data and AI layer of the product end to end.