Product Lead Engineer

Role Overview

Product Lead Engineer is the technical authority for multiple Agile Scrum teams within a vertical product. This is a player-coach role with no personnel management, where you set technical direction, make implementation calls, and raise the engineering capability of others.

Responsibilities

Technical Team Leadership

• Act as the technical authority across development teams: make implementation decisions, resolve technical disagreements, and maintain high engineering standards.
• Lead end-to-end delivery of complex features across backend, frontend, and mobile (design → deployment → monitoring).
• Decompose ambiguous requirements into well-scoped tasks.
• Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability risks.
• Contribute regularly to production code and model expected engineering standards.

Technical Leadership & Mentorship

• Perform thorough, constructive code reviews to improve quality and accelerate junior engineers’ growth.
• Mentor engineers via pairing, design discussions, and ongoing technical guidance.
• Drive best practices for testing, branching, documentation, and security.

Cross-Functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product, QA, and Customer Success to clarify requirements, estimate accurately, and deliver on schedule.
• Communicate technical risks, progress, and tradeoffs clearly to technical and non-technical stakeholders.

Technical Ownership & Cross-Training

• Own one or more significant product areas: architecture, behavior, and failure modes; be the decision authority for those areas.
• Lead knowledge transfer so the team can operate effectively without you (avoid single-engineer bottlenecks).
• Participate in cross-training to build resilience across product areas.

Performance Standards (What Success Looks Like)

• Technical quality: decisions and designs meet peer review standards with minimal rework; reduce technical debt and reliability risks over time.
• Delivery & reliability: accurate estimation, early risk surfacing with mitigations, rapid incident resolution with durable root cause fixes.
• Organizational impact: engineers improve their code quality and technical judgment; recommendations are trusted across the organization.