Lead Developer (Remote)

We're looking for a hands-on Lead Developer (Remote) to own delivery across our engineering team. This is not a pure people-management role — you'll be the technical anchor who turns product ideas into shipped features. You will work directly with the Product team to finalize and scope requirements, break them into well-defined tasks, assign work across frontend, mobile, backend, and AI engineers, unblock the team daily, and be accountable for on-time, high-quality delivery.

If you enjoy sitting at the intersection of product, architecture, and execution — and you've shipped AI-powered products at scale—this role is for you.

What You’ll Do

Delivery Ownership

• Own the end-to-end delivery lifecycle: requirement finalization → technical design →task breakdown → sprint execution → release.
• Work closely with Product to refine ambiguous requirements into clear, estimable, technically sound specifications before development begins.
• Define sprint scope, set realistic timelines, and communicate delivery status, risks, and trade-offs to stakeholders proactively.
• Be accountable for release quality — code reviews, testing standards, and production readiness are yours to enforce.

Team Leadership

• Assign and prioritize tasks across the team (frontend, mobile, backend, AI, QA) based on skill, capacity, and delivery priorities.
• Identify and resolve blockers fast — whether technical (architecture decisions, third-party API issues, infrastructure problems) or process-related (unclear requirements, cross-team dependencies).
• Run daily standups, sprint planning, and retrospectives; keep the team focused and shielded from noise.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and design discussions; raise the technical bar of the team.

Hands-On Engineering

• Contribute code to the most critical or complex parts of the system — you should be comfortable jumping into any layer of the stack.
• Drive architecture decisions across services: API design, data modeling, caching strategy, queueing, and service boundaries.
• Design and review integrations with third-party APIs (travel, payments, messaging, calendar providers).
• Champion automation across the SDLC — CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and internal workflow automation.

Our Tech Stack

• Frontend: React (web) and React Native (mobile) — component-driven architecture, shared code across platforms, modern state management
• Mobile: React Native (iOS-first) — native module integration, deep links, app store releases
• Backend: Node.js — REST / event-driven microservices
• AI Services: Python with FastAPI — LLM orchestration, agentic workflows, RAG pipelines
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis — polyglot persistence across transactional, document, and caching layers
• Infrastructure: AWS (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS/SNS, CloudWatch)
• Automation: Heavy investment in workflow automation, CI/CD, and agent-driven task execution

What We're Looking For

Must-Have

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years leading a team or acting as tech lead on delivery-critical projects.
• Strong production experience with Node.js backend services and React frontends; hands-on experience with React Native mobile apps (or strong willingness to lead mobile delivery). experience building or leading React Native mobile apps.
• Working proficiency in Python, with experience building or reviewing FastAPI services.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis — you know when to use each and how to design schemas, indexes, and caching strategies that hold up under load.
• Hands-on AWS experience: deploying, scaling, monitoring, and cost-optimizing production workloads.
• Proven track record of taking features from a rough product brief to production —including scoping, estimation, task breakdown, and delivery management.
• Strong communication skills: you can push back on Product with data, explain trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, and give engineers clear, actionable direction.
• Experience unblocking teams: debugging across the stack, making pragmatic architecture calls, and negotiating scope when timelines are tight.

Strong Plus

• Experience with automation-heavy systems — workflow engines (n8n, Temporal, Airflow), browser/task automation, or agentic AI pipelines.
• Experience building or operating LLM-powered products: prompt engineering, RAG, vector databases, agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain), or LLM observability (LangFuse, Datadog).
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message queues (SQS, Kafka, RabbitMQ).
• Experience integrating third-party APIs at scale — payments (Stripe), messaging (WhatsApp/Twilio), travel, or calendar providers.
• Infrastructure as code (Terraform, CDK) and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS).
• Experience shipping React Native apps to the App Store / Play Store — Expo, native modules, deep links, or OTA updates.
• Prior experience in a fast-moving start up or 0→1 product environment.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• The chance to build a category-defining AI product from the UAE for a global audience.
• High ownership, small team, direct impact — your decisions ship to hundreds of thousands of users.
• Modern tooling and an automation-first engineering culture.