Team Lead Software Engineer
Location: Pittsburgh, PA (Hybrid – in office 4 days/week)
Type: Full-time

About Us
We’re a fast-moving startup based in Pittsburgh. We’re a small, highly collaborative team focused on shipping meaningful features quickly and correctly. As we grow, we’re looking for a technical leader who enjoys owning systems, mentoring engineers, and staying hands-on in the code.

The Role
We’re hiring a Team Lead Software Engineer to lead a small engineering team while remaining deeply involved in building our product. This role is ideal for someone who thrives in early-stage environments, enjoys technical ownership, and wants to help shape both the codebase and the engineering culture.

You’ll work closely with founders and product stakeholders to design, build, and scale real-time, AI-enabled systems.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and mentor a small team of engineers through code reviews, technical guidance, and hands-on collaboration

• Build and maintain scalable backend services in Python within the Google Cloud ecosystem (e.g., Cloud Functions, Cloud Run)

• Design and implement real-time and streaming architectures, including WebSocket and streaming endpoints for low-latency, bi-directional communication

• Write server-side code to orchestrate AI services, integrating third-party APIs (e.g., OpenAI) and native cloud solutions such as Google Vertex AI, including streaming response patterns

• Develop and maintain responsive frontend interfaces, ensuring smooth handling of asynchronous data streams and real-time state updates

• Own key technical decisions around architecture, performance, reliability, and security

• Own CI/CD pipelines for automated testing and deployment across the stack; manage infrastructure as code and monitor system health

• Partner with product and business stakeholders to scope, plan, and ship features efficiently

• Improve engineering processes and standards as the team and product scale

Must-haves

• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience

• Experience leading or mentoring a small engineering team

• Strong full-stack engineering background with hands-on ownership

• Deep Python backend expertise, including asynchronous programming and frameworks such as FastAPI or Django

• Proven experience building real-time systems using WebSockets, Server-Sent Events (SSE), and/or gRPC

• Production experience with modern frontend frameworks such as Flutter/Dart or React, including managing socket connections and client-side state

• Cloud-native experience with GCP (preferred), AWS, or Azure, including serverless architectures such as Cloud Run or Lambda

• Experience integrating third-party APIs, including streaming responses from LLMs or other AI services

• Strong understanding of database design, security rules, and performance optimization

• Comfortable working in a startup environment with ambiguity, ownership, and rapid iteration

• Based in or able to commute to Pittsburgh and work in-office 4 days per week

Nice-to-haves

• Prior experience at an early-stage startup

• Experience designing scalable APIs and distributed systems

• Familiarity with observability, monitoring, and production debugging

• React experience

Why Join Us

• Real ownership over architecture and technical direction

• A small team where your work has immediate, visible impact

• Opportunity to shape the engineering organization from an early stage

• Hybrid work with intentional, high-value in-person collaboration