Lead Developer (Remote)

CNTXT AI; Dubai; Remote; AED 180,000 - 280,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Competitive salary

Remote work

Job summary

CNTXT AI in the United Arab Emirates seeks a hands-on Lead Developer to own delivery across the engineering team in a remote setup. You will be the technical anchor translating product ideas into shipped features and guiding frontend, mobile, backend, and AI engineers.

You’ll work closely with product to finalize requirements, set sprint goals, and ensure on-time, high-quality releases while mentoring the team and driving architectural decisions across services and integrations.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with 2+ years leading a team or delivery-critical projects.
• Strong production experience with Node.js backend services and React frontends; hands-on React Native experience or willingness to lead mobile delivery.
• Working proficiency in Python, with FastAPI experience.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis; design of schemas, indexes and caching for load.
• Hands-on AWS experience: deploying, scaling, monitoring, and cost-optimizing production workloads.
• Proven track record of taking features from rough briefs to production: scoping, estimation, task breakdown, delivery management.
• Strong communication: data-driven challenge to Product; clear guidance to engineers.
• Experience unblocking teams: debugging across stack and architecture decisions.

Responsibilities

• Own the end-to-end delivery lifecycle from requirement finalization to release.
• Refine ambiguous requirements with Product into clear, estimable specs.
• Define sprint scope, timelines, and communicate delivery status and risks.
• Enforce release quality with code reviews, testing standards, and production readiness.
• Assign and prioritize tasks across frontend, mobile, backend, and AI teams.
• Mentor engineers via code reviews, pairing, and design discussions.
• Contribute code to critical parts of the system across stack and drive architecture decisions.
• Champion automation across SDLC: CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code.

Skills

React

React Native

Node.js

Python

AWS

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Redis

REST API

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

FastAPI

Job description

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.