Lead Software Engineer

Overview

Why this role matters

Responsibilities

• Set and evolve technical direction across Landela's products, including application architecture, frontend and backend patterns, APIs, data models, integrations, cloud infrastructure, reliability, security, and engineering tooling.
• Remain hands-on in the codebase, designing and implementing production software across frontend and backend systems, particularly on complex, foundational, high-risk, or cross-cutting work.
• Work with company leadership and product stakeholders to translate business and product priorities into practical technical approaches, identify trade-offs, and determine where engineering investment will have the greatest impact.
• Lead the design of significant systems and technical initiatives, making pragmatic decisions around scope, scalability, maintainability, reliability, security, operational complexity, cost, and delivery speed.
• Guide cloud and DevOps practices including infrastructure, environments, CI/CD, deployment workflows, observability, secrets, configuration, operational tooling, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Establish practical engineering standards for code quality, testing, API design, documentation, security, observability, code review, and production readiness without introducing unnecessary process.
• Help break larger product and technical initiatives into clear engineering work, identify dependencies and risks, and provide enough direction for engineers to execute independently.
• Lead or support investigation of significant production incidents, performance issues, difficult technical problems, and recurring failures, ensuring lessons result in concrete improvements.
• Design and review integrations with external APIs, payment providers, identity systems, partners, and other third-party services, including failure handling, data consistency, monitoring, and recovery.
• Mentor Senior and Software Engineers through architecture discussions, code and design reviews, pairing, debugging, and direct technical feedback, helping them take broader ownership over time.
• Contribute actively to engineering hiring, including defining technical expectations, reviewing candidates, participating in interviews, and helping maintain an appropriate hiring bar.
• Support onboarding of new engineers and help them build enough product and system context to become productive without creating long-term dependency on the Lead Software Engineer.
• Maintain enough technical context across Landela's systems to identify cross-cutting risks and opportunities while deliberately distributing ownership across the engineering team.

Requirements

What success looks like

• The engineering team has clear technical direction and can make day-to-day implementation decisions without depending on constant escalation.
• Frontend, backend, infrastructure, deployment, observability, security, and integration practices become more consistent across products.
• Architecture decisions are pragmatic and appropriate for Landela's current stage while avoiding obvious technical dead ends.
• The team can move from product problems to production software with clear ownership, sensible decomposition, and fewer avoidable delivery surprises.
• Production reliability and operational visibility improve, and recurring technical problems are addressed at their root rather than repeatedly patched.
• Senior and Software Engineers take increasingly broad technical ownership because system knowledge, standards, and decision-making are shared effectively.
• New engineers are hired against a clear technical bar, onboard effectively, and become productive without excessive dependence on one person.
• Technical debt and infrastructure work are prioritised according to product, operational, and business impact rather than either being ignored or becoming unlimited engineering projects.
• Company leadership can rely on the engineering team for sound technical recommendations without needing to participate in every architecture decision, deployment, or implementation detail.

Working style