Tech Lead

Valid8 Financial, Inc.; Town of Texas (WI); Hybrid; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Valid8 Financial, Inc. is seeking a hands-on Tech Lead to drive the technical health and execution of a SaaS engineering team in Wisconsin. This player-coach role focuses on enabling engineers to make high‑quality decisions aligned with established patterns and precedents.

The role emphasizes distributed ownership, ADR-driven decisions, and a strong DevOps culture. You will mentor engineers, participate in hiring, and partner with Product to translate priorities into technically sound plans.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of experience building and operating production SaaS apps.
• 5+ years with Java and Spring Boot.
• Familiarity with Angular and SPA development.
• Experience with containers and cloud-native patterns.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, modern software delivery.
• Experience in DevOps, including deployment ownership, observability, reliability, and production support.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, APIs, data modeling, performance, scalability, and security.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical decisions and developing engineers.

Responsibilities

• Create a culture of distributed technical ownership and decision-making.
• Drive ADRs for significant decisions.
• Ensure decisions consider tradeoffs, risks, and architectural precedent.
• Encourage engineers to lead technical design, providing guidance and challenge.
• Drive engineering best practices across design, development, testing, security, observability, performance, and reliability.
• Keep technical debt and architectural risk visible and actively managed.
• Stay close to the code and systems the team owns.
• Contribute directly to complex, high-risk, or strategically important work.
• Participate in technical design and code reviews.
• Pair with engineers on difficult problems and provide technical leadership during production incidents.
• Hands-on work should focus where it provides the most leverage to the team.
• Directly manage, mentor, and develop engineers.
• Set clear expectations around quality, ownership, and performance.
• Provide regular feedback and career development.
• Develop engineers' ability to independently own technical design and decisions.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
• Partner with Product to turn priorities into technically sound plans.
• Ensure complex work receives appropriate technical discovery and design before development.
• Surface technical risks, dependencies, and complexity early.
• Balance delivery with technical debt, reliability, and long-term platform health.
• Own the engineering execution and technical outcomes of the team.

Skills

Team leadership

Mentoring

Java

Spring Boot

Angular

SPA development

CI/CD

DevOps

Observability

Security

Code reviews

Technical design

Architectural decisions

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Job description

The Tech Lead is a hands-on engineering leader responsible for the technical health, quality, and execution of an engineering team.

This is a player-coach role. The Tech Lead is not the team's architect or the person who makes every technical decision. Their job is to create an environment where engineers make good technical decisions that are explicit, documented when appropriate, and aligned with established patterns and precedent.

Success means building a team that does not depend on the Tech Lead to make good technical decisions.

Technical Governance

• Create a culture of distributed technical ownership and decision-making.
• Drive the use of Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for significant decisions.
• Ensure decisions consider tradeoffs, risks, and existing architectural precedent.
• Encourage engineers to lead technical design, providing guidance and challenge rather than prescribing solutions.
• Drive engineering best practices across design, development, testing, security, observability, performance, and reliability.
• Keep technical debt and architectural risk visible and actively managed.
• Stay close to the code and systems the team owns.
• Contribute directly to complex, high-risk, or strategically important work.
• Participate in technical design and code reviews.
• Pair with engineers on difficult problems and provide technical leadership during production incidents.

Hands-on work should focus where it provides the most leverage to the team, not on maintaining the capacity of a full-time individual contributor.

• Directly manage, mentor, and develop engineers.
• Set clear expectations around quality, ownership, and performance.
• Provide regular feedback and career development.
• Develop engineers' ability to independently own technical design and decisions.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, and performance management.
• Partner with Product to turn priorities into technically sound plans.
• Ensure complex work receives appropriate technical discovery and design before development.
• Surface technical risks, dependencies, and complexity early.
• Balance delivery with technical debt, reliability, and long-term platform health.
• Own the engineering execution and technical outcomes of the team.

Experience

• 7+ years experience building and operating production SaaS applications.
• 5+ years experience with Java and Spring Boot.
• Familiarity with Angular and Single Page Application (SPA) development.
• Experience with containers and cloud-native application patterns.
• Strong understanding of CI/CD, automated testing, and modern software delivery.
• Experience working within a DevOps philosophy, including ownership of deployment, observability, reliability, and production support.
• Strong understanding of software architecture, APIs, data modeling, performance, scalability, and security.
• Demonstrated experience leading technical decisions and developing engineers.