Senior Python/Django Tech Lead — AI-Driven Backend Architect

Follett Corporation; Westchester (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Job summary

Follett Corporation in Westchester, IL, seeks a Team Lead, Python/Django Engineering to set architecture and drive backend services built on Python/Django with PostgreSQL, while mentoring engineers and reviewing production code.

You will own AI-assisted development practices, partner with DevOps and product teams, and lead the delivery pipeline, balancing technical leadership with hands-on coding.

Responsibilities

• Serve as the top technical authority for the team: own architecture decisions, system design, and technical roadmap for Python/Django services, and set the engineering standard through hands-on code.
• Guide and review the team’s lighter-weight React front-end work, ensuring it stays consistent with backend patterns and quality bar - this is a supporting surface, not the primary focus of the role.
• Own PostgreSQL data architecture end-to-end - schema design, query optimization, indexing strategy, migrations, and data integrity across production systems.
• Partner directly with the DevOps/Infrastructure team to assess PostgreSQL instance health, performance, capacity limitations, and instance-level design decisions (beyond query/schema tuning).
• Design and lead enterprise integration architecture - event-driven and asynchronous patterns, message queues, third-party API integrations, and multi-consumer data fan-out across downstream systems.
• Lead code review and pairing on the team’s hardest and highest-risk work, personally driving resolution on the most complex technical problems.
• Drive CI/CD pipeline improvements, including test automation, deployment safety, and rollback procedures.
• Monitor production health using observability tooling (e.g., PagerDuty, logging/metrics dashboards) and lead incident response and root-cause analysis.
• Mentor engineers through pairing, code review, and informal technical growth conversations - partnering with the Engineering Manager on formal career development, hiring, and performance reviews rather than owning them.
• Partner with product owners, QA, and adjacent platform teams to scope work, surface technical risk, and inform delivery timelines - without owning sprint planning or backlog grooming.
• Champion secure coding practices, database access controls, and compliance with data-handling and change-management policies.
• Own the team’s AI-assisted development practice - already a heavy part of the workflow (Claude, Claude Code, GitHub Copilot) - and push it further: tooling choices, workflow patterns, and review standards for AI-assisted and AI-generated code.

Skills

Python

Django

PostgreSQL

React

CI/CD

Observability

Code Review

Mentoring

Tools

GitHub Copilot

PagerDuty

CI/CD tooling

Job description

Follett Corporation in Westchester, IL, seeks a Team Lead, Python/Django Engineering to set architecture and drive backend services built on Python/Django with PostgreSQL, while mentoring engineers and reviewing production code.

You will own AI-assisted development practices, partner with DevOps and product teams, and lead the delivery pipeline, balancing technical leadership with hands-on coding.