Lead Engineer - AI-Native Email App

About KIRA

The role

What you will own

• Lead technical design and execution for major products, features, and engineering initiatives.
• Design scalable systems across backend, frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
• Remain hands-on through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging, and production problem-solving.
• Make architecture decisions and trade-offs involving speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Translate ambiguous product and technical problems into engineering solutions and execution plans.
• Set standards for code quality, testing, security, observability, and production reliability.
• Review technical designs and code and provide actionable feedback.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen technical capability across the team.
• Identify technical risks, bottlenecks, and architectural weaknesses.
• Collaborate with engineering, product, design, and AI teams to ship products.
• Improve tooling, development practices, and automation.
• Own systems after release through monitoring, incident investigation, root-cause resolution, and reliability improvements.

What we are looking for

• Significant experience building and shipping production systems.
• Deep expertise in one or more of backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs, databases, or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong system design and architecture skills for complex or high-scale systems.
• Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.
• Experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to engineers.
• Experience with code review, complex debugging, and production systems.
• Ability to communicate technical decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams.
• Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Ability to work with ambiguity and own work from problem definition through production.
• Strong judgment about speed, simplification, and deeper engineering investment.
• Strong English communication skills.

Workplace

• The role is hybrid, with at least three days per week in the local office and remaining days available for remote work.
• Candidates should be based in, or able to work from, the location where the role is advertised.

Interview process

• The process includes an online assessment or practical task, a technical interview, and a CEO or final round.
• The company aims to complete the process and make an offer within one week from its start for strong candidates.