Software Engineering Team Lead

MetalBear; Greater London; On-site; GBP 90,000 - 120,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Remote-first culture

Competitive salary

Job summary

MetalBear is a remote-first, early-stage startup building mirrord, a Kubernetes development platform that lets developers and AI agents run code against a live cluster before deployment. We’re seeking a hands-on engineering leader to head the Cloud Integrations Team, owning features for managing cloud services and creating isolated environments with minimal duplication.

You will stay hands-on, contribute to code, and guide the technical direction while collaborating with Kubernetes, cloud

Qualifications

• Minimum 1 year leading engineering teams.
• At least 4 years writing production-grade code in Rust (preferred) or C/C++.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.

Responsibilities

• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of mirrord’s cloud integration features like queue splitting and DB branching.
• Stay hands-on and actively contribute to the codebase.
• Work with Kubernetes, cloud services, DB systems, message brokers, and other tools and platforms.
• Set the technical direction for the team and maintain high engineering standards.
• Drive smart, effective use of AI across the team.
• Help prioritize work, unblock engineers, and drive roadmap execution.
• Hire and mentor engineers as the team grows.
• Partner with Product, Solution Engineering and directly with users to drive adoption and expansion.

Skills

Rust

C++

Leadership

Distributed systems

Tools

Kubernetes

Cloud services

GitOps

Databases

Message brokers

Job description

MetalBear is remote-first, early-stage, and product-led. We're building mirrord, a Kubernetes development platform that lets developers and AI coding agents run code against a live cluster before it's deployed.

The problem we solve is the wait. In any organization running microservices, checking whether a change actually works means building an image, pushing it, deploying to a shared environment, and waiting on a pipeline to tell you. That loop runs many times a day per engineer, and it's the single biggest tax on how fast an organization ships. With mirrord, the service runs wherever the work is already happening: on a laptop, in CI, or inside an agent's sandbox. Its traffic, environment variables, and file access are forwarded to and from a shared staging cluster, so the service behaves exactly as it would if it were deployed, without deploying it. Feedback arrives in seconds instead of minutes, against real APIs, real schemas, and real traffic rather than mocks or a hand-maintained local stack.

That matters more every month, because AI agents now write a large share of the code our customers ship. An agent generating code from static files is guessing at how the rest of the system behaves, and a human has to catch the guesses. mirrord gives the agent the real context to write against and a real feedback loop to verify against, so what lands in review is something a reviewer can trust.

mirrord is used by thousands of developers worldwide, including at Fortune 500 companies.

We’re looking for a hands-on engineering leader to lead the Cloud Integrations Team. The Cloud Integrations team owns features that involve automatically managing users’ cloud services (like message brokers, databases, Kubernetes resources and more) to create virtually separate environments with only minimal resource duplication. These are key features that make mirrord uniquely valuable in complex enterprise environments.

What You’ll Do

• Lead the design, development, and maintenance of mirrord’s cloud integration features like queue splitting, DB branching, and more.
• Stay hands-on and actively contribute to the codebase.
• Work with Kubernetes, cloud services, DB systems, message brokers, and other tools and platforms.
• Set the technical direction for the team and maintain high engineering standards.
• Drive smart, effective use of AI across the team.
• Help prioritize work, unblock engineers, and drive roadmap execution.
• Hire and mentor engineers as the team grows.
• Partner with Product, Solution Engineering and directly with users to drive adoption and expansion.

Requirements

• At least 1 year of experience leading engineering teams.
• At least 4 years of professional experience writing production-grade code in Rust (most preferably), C++, or C.
• Excellent communication skills.
• Understanding of Kubernetes and cloud-native environments.
• Strong systems-level thinking and an ability to debug complex, distributed environments.
• Comfortable working async in a remote-first, startup environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience building developer tools.
• Experience building Kubernetes operators or other components that interact with the Kubernetes API.
• Familiarity with backend infrastructure tooling like data stores, message brokers, GitOps tools, etc.

Why MetalBear?

• Work on hard, meaningful problems at the intersection of local development and cloud infrastructure.
• Be part of a small, high-caliber team where your work directly impacts thousands of developers and some of the world’s biggest companies.
• Work also on an open-source product used and loved by developers.
• Remote-first, async-friendly, and low on meetings.
• Competitive salary, stock options, and a culture that respects your time.