Tech Lead Manager: Developer Platform & CI/CD

Northwood Space; New Mexico; On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

Northwood Space is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to own patterns for building, testing, and releasing software across FPGA, embedded, DSP, cloud, and ground teams. You will provide CI tooling, pipelines, release mechanics, and developer environments while guiding internal tooling across engineering and business functions.

This player-coach role mentors a small team of internal tooling and developer experience engineers, stays hands-on, and leads sprint planning under the Head of Platform.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in computer science, engineering, or related field, or equivalent practical experience.
• 8+ years of software or platform engineering experience, including 2+ years leading a team or workstream as a tech lead.
• Demonstrated ownership of a CI/CD or build framework adopted by multiple teams with different toolchains, including adoption decisions.
• Experience building developer platforms or paved paths for engineering disciplines you weren't part of (e.g., tooling for firmware/hardware/data teams).
• Strong proficiency in at least one systems language (Rust, Go, or C++) and Python.
• Hands-on experience with GitLab CI or equivalent, container builds, and artifact management.
• Ability to write clear technical standards and drive adoption beyond your team.
• Experience delivering internal applications or tools to non-engineering users, including stakeholder scoping.

Responsibilities

• Own the build, test, and release frameworks used across Northwood's repos, including the build system, GitLab CI templates, artifact management, and versioning conventions.
• Provide paved paths like reusable pipelines and build components, with fast checks that fail early before expensive builds and tests.
• Define the guardrails repo owners work within (minimum pipeline stages, signing, promotion gates) and make the compliant path the easiest path.
• Partner with domain leads to understand build and release friction, prioritize it on the tooling roadmap, and measure adoption.
• Own internal software development: intake, prioritization, delivery, and lifecycle of applications Northwood builds for its own use across engineering and business functions.
• Collaborate across teams, contributing shared frameworks, components, and engineering capacity to support product development and operator workflows.
• Lead the Development team as a player-coach with sprint planning, design and code reviews, and hands-on contributions.

Skills

CI/CD ownership

Systems programming

Python

Team leadership

Developer platforms

Education

Bachelor's degree in CS/Engineering

Tools

GitLab CI

Container builds

Artifact management

Nix

Job description

Northwood Space is seeking a Tech Lead Manager to own patterns for building, testing, and releasing software across FPGA, embedded, DSP, cloud, and ground teams. You will provide CI tooling, pipelines, release mechanics, and developer environments while guiding internal tooling across engineering and business functions.

This player-coach role mentors a small team of internal tooling and developer experience engineers, stays hands-on, and leads sprint planning under the Head of Platform.