Hands-On Tech Lead Manager & Squad Coach

Aplazo; United States; Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Aplazo is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to guide a squad of 4–8 engineers. This player-coach role blends hands-on coding (40–60%) with people leadership, delivery ownership, and a culture of ownership and psychological safety.

You’ll run 1:1s, coach careers, and build a high-performing team while steering architecture discussions and software delivery. Expect collaboration with product and design, plus ongoing incident management and AI-enhanced workflows.

Qualifications

• 4+ years in software engineering with hands-on leadership experience
• Experience managing or leading a team (formal or informal)
• Strong architecture and code-review skills
• Proficiency with CI/CD, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), and observability tools

Responsibilities

• Build the team: recruit and onboard engineers
• Develop your people: run 1:1s, provide feedback, reviews, and career coaching
• Foster culture: build psychological safety, ownership, and accountability
• Shield the team: remove blockers and keep delivery focus
• Stay hands-on: code, review PRs, and guide technical decisions
• Own delivery: ensure commitments with quality and velocity
• Drive quality: champion testing and observability
• Handle incidents: own squad-level incidents and postmortems
• Leverage AI: use AI for reviews, design, and debugging
• Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives
• Align with product: translate requirements with PMs/designers
• Communicate up: represent squad in planning and leadership discussions
• Nice to have: fintech, or scaling teams, coaching practices
• On-call and incident management experience

Skills

Team leadership

Hands-on coding

Architecture guidance

CI/CD & cloud

AI-assisted development

Communication

Tools

AWS

GCP

DataDog

Jenkins

Pulumi

PostgreSQL

MongoDB

Job description

Aplazo is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to guide a squad of 4–8 engineers. This player-coach role blends hands-on coding (40–60%) with people leadership, delivery ownership, and a culture of ownership and psychological safety.

You’ll run 1:1s, coach careers, and build a high-performing team while steering architecture discussions and software delivery. Expect collaboration with product and design, plus ongoing incident management and AI-enhanced workflows.