software engineering team lead

JOB DESCRIPTION

This role combines engineering team leadership with solution architecture stewardship. The focus is on enabling teams to deliver high-quality, scalable solutions through strong technical direction, standards, and mentoring — not on day-to-day feature ownership.

Hands-on implementation is selective and situational, primarily during prototyping, critical incidents, or when resolving complex technical blockers. Architecture work is strategic and episodic, ensuring long-term system health while supporting near-term delivery.

What This Role Is Not

• Not a ticket-driven individual contributor role
• Not responsible for owning every feature end-to-end
• Not a constant firefighting or 24/7 on-call position
• Not a siloed architect role detached from engineering teams

Why This Role Is Interesting

• Influence architecture across multiple platforms at real production scale
• Shape engineering standards and technical direction
• Flexibility to work on state-of-the-art technologies
• Evolve systems incrementally rather than maintaining legacy platforms

You'll succeed if you enjoy enabling teams, making thoughtful architectural trade-offs, and balancing delivery with long-term maintainability. We value sound judgment and a learning mindset over checking every box.

RESPONSIBILITIES

1. As a Team Lead

• Lead, mentor, and support a cross-functional engineering team spanning backend, frontend, mobile, and IoT
• Foster alignment across projects, priorities, and stakeholders
• Conduct design and code reviews, providing technical guidance without micromanagement
• Establish and maintain development standards, best practices, and architectural guidelines
• Support onboarding, performance guidance, and skill development
• Promote ownership, accountability, and psychological safety
• Participate in planning, estimation, and technical risk assessment
• Facilitate daily stand-ups and regular team ceremonies to ensure visibility, alignment, and steady delivery progress
• Apply agile delivery practices, leveraging relevant tools for sprint planning, tracking, and team coordination
• Follow up on the company practices related to the department management and reporting

2. As a Solution Architect

• Define, evolve, and govern end-to-end system architectures across platforms
• Ensure architectures are scalable, secure, maintainable, and aligned with business goals
• Evaluate and recommend technologies, frameworks, and patterns
• Prepare and maintain architecture diagrams, technical specifications, and solution documentation
• Act as the technical authority in cross-team and cross-department discussions
• Balance performance, reliability, cost, and operational complexity in architectural decisions

3. As a Senior Engineer

• Define reference architectures, technical templates, and reusable patterns
• Review high-impact designs, implementations, and deployment strategies
• Ensure observability, security, reliability, and performance standards are embedded in delivery
• Maintain oversight of CI/CD pipelines, testing strategies, and release processes
• Act as an escalation point for complex technical challenges and critical incidents
• Step in hands-on only when necessary (e.g., prototyping, production incidents, technical deadlocks)
• Oversee delivery timelines and release cycles, ensuring coordinated, predictable, and high-quality product releases.

REQUIREMENTS

1. Engineering Leadership & Collaboration

• Strong understanding of leading, mentoring, and supporting senior, mid-level or junior engineers
• Comfortable facilitating design reviews, code reviews, and architectural discussions
• Ability to work effectively with management and business stakeholders to align technical direction with business goals
• Ownership mindset with an appreciation for balancing delivery speed, engineering quality, and long-term maintainability

2. Architecture & System Design

• Solid understanding of distributed system design, including APIs, event-driven architectures, and system integrations
• Ability to reason about and explain architectural trade-offs across performance, reliability, cost, and complexity
• Comfortable producing and consuming architecture diagrams, technical designs, and solution documentation
• Willingness to act as a technical authority and escalation point when needed
• Exposure to collaborating on data dashboards and reporting solutions (e.g., Tableau), with an appreciation for usability and design quality

3. Core Engineering Knowledge

• MUST HAVE 5 YEARS+ WORKING EXPERIENCE WITH:
• Java and Spring Boot (Back-end)
• Any Relational Database
• or equivalent (Front-end)

• Familiarity with building and supporting production-grade systems, or the ability to reason about production concerns

• Good understanding of:

• Microservices architecture and common design patterns
• SQL replication, routing, and high-availability concepts
• Database proxies or read-scaling approaches (e.g., MaxScale)
• Caching strategies (e.g., Redis)

• Event-driven or messaging systems (e.g., Kafka, MQTT)

• Exposure to or interest in:

• C# and .NET
• PHP (Laravel)
• Mobile application development

4. Cloud, Containers & Delivery

• Understanding of containerization and orchestration concepts (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Exposure to CI/CD pipelines, release workflows, and automated delivery practices
• Familiarity with artifact management and multi-environment deployment strategies
• Working knowledge of Linux and Windows server environments, or the ability to adapt quickly in enterprise setups

5. Reliability, Observability & Operations

• Strong appreciation for observability and operational excellence
• Familiarity with monitoring, logging, and alerting tools (e.g., ELK, Prometheus, Grafana, or equivalents)
• Understanding of distributed tracing concepts and tooling (e.g., OpenTelemetry)
• Awareness of reliability, performance, and security considerations in real-world systems
• Understanding of resilience patterns such as retries, backoff, idempotency, circuit breakers, bulkheads, and graceful shutdowns

6. Technical Judgment & Growth Mindset

• Ability to apply sound technical judgment and guide engineering decisions at a high level
• Comfortable setting direction and standards without necessarily owning day-to-day feature delivery
• Strong growth mindset with a willingness to learn, adapt, and continuously improve engineering practices

QUALIFICATION

• University degree or equivalent in computing or software development
• At least 5 years experience

Job Types: Full-time, Contract

Contract length: 12 months

Pay: RM5, RM8,000.00 per month

Benefits:

• Professional development

Work Location: In person