Technical Lead

Ledger Run; Austin (TX); On-site; USD 140,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Ledger Run in Austin, TX is seeking a Tech Lead to guide an engineering team, owning delivery and quality while remaining hands-on when leverage is high. You will foster distributed ownership, promote Architecture Decision Records, mentor engineers, and collaborate closely with Product to ensure production systems are reliable, scalable, and secure.

The role balances strategic architecture with practical delivery, balancing technical debt against feature velocity, and coaches others toward

Qualifications

• Significant experience building and operating production SaaS applications.
• Strong experience with Java and Spring Boot.
• Familiarity with Angular and 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.

Responsibilities

• Foster distributed ownership and ADR culture.
• Drive ADR use for significant decisions.
• Ensure decisions weigh tradeoffs and precedents.
• Encourage engineers to lead technical design.
• Guide best practices in design, development, testing, security, observability, performance, reliability.
• Manage technical debt and architectural risk.
• Stay close to code and systems.
• Contribute to complex, high-risk work.
• Participate in design and code reviews.
• Pair with engineers on difficult problems and provide leadership during production incidents.
• Hands-on work should leverage team leverage, not constant IC.
• Directly manage, mentor, and develop engineers.
• Set expectations around quality, ownership, and performance.
• Provide feedback and career development.
• Help engineers own design decisions.
• Participate in hiring, onboarding, performance management.
• Partner with Product to turn priorities into technically sound plans.
• Ensure complex work has 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

Distributed ownership

ADR usage

Mentoring engineers

Hiring participation

Product collaboration

Technical debt management

Incident leadership

Code reviews

Pair programming

Team leadership

Tools

Java

Spring Boot

Angular

Docker

CI/CD

Cloud-native

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

• Significant experience building and operating production SaaS applications.
• Strong 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.