Technical Lead, Applications

European Recruitment BV; United States; On-site; USD 160,000 - 230,000; Full time

Job summary

European Recruitment BV is seeking a Technical Lead, Applications to own the core architecture that connects AI systems to real-world user experiences. This hands-on leadership role centers on design, reliability, and evolution of backend services, APIs, and client integrations.

You will lead a small, senior applications team across backend, mobile, and desktop, ensuring production-grade reliability, observability, and scalable performance as the product evolves.

Qualifications

• Significant experience leading application engineering for complex systems.
• Hands-on backend development experience and proven shipping of backend services.
• Experience delivering AI-powered products with model integration.

Responsibilities

• Own the application engineering strategy across backend, mobile, and desktop.
• Lead and grow a senior applications team.
• Ensure production readiness with observability, monitoring, retries, and fallbacks.
• Set architectural direction for AI-powered product workflows and APIs.
• Partner with ML leadership to translate model capabilities into features.
• Balance latency, cost, reliability, and user experience.

Skills

Application architecture

Backend systems

AI integration

Leadership

Observability

Job description

As Technical Lead, Applications, you directly own the core application architecture that connects AI systems to real-world user experiences. You are responsible for the design, reliability, and evolution of backend services, APIs, and client integrations across mobile and desktop.

This is a hands‑on leadership role. You stay close to the code, make critical architectural decisions, and ensure the system remains fast, reliable, and coherent as it scales.

Focus

• Own the application engineering strategy and execution across backend, mobile, and desktop.

• Lead and grow a small, senior applications team, including backend, mobile, and desktop engineers.

• Ensure production‑grade reliability: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, and failure handling.

• Set the architectural direction for AI‑powered product workflows, APIs, and client integrations.

• Ensure AI capabilities are integrated into the product with clear abstractions, predictable behavior, and graceful failure modes.

• Partner closely with Machine Learning leadership to translate model capability into shippable product features.

• Make high‑impact decisions across latency, cost, reliability, security, and user experience.

• Establish a strong execution culture through code reviews, design reviews, and hands‑on technical leadership.

• Ensure production readiness: observability, monitoring, retries, fallbacks, privacy, and cost controls.

• Balance speed and discipline – shipping quickly without compromising long‑term system quality.

Ideal Experiences

• Significant experience leading application or product engineering for complex systems.

• Strong hands‑on background building and shipping backend systems used in production.

• Experience delivering AI‑powered products, with a deep understanding of model integration trade‑offs.

• Excellent system design skills across services, APIs, clients, and data flows.

• Comfort operating across platforms (backend, mobile, desktop), even if your depth is in one.

• Proven ability to make high‑impact technical decisions under ambiguity.

• A strong bias toward shipping, iteration, and learning from real‑world usage.

• Move fast without breaking fundamentals.

Outcomes

• Production systems are observable, monitored, and stable under real‑world load.

• Decisions consistently balance speed, cost, reliability, and user experience.

• Features across backend, mobile, and desktop work smoothly and reliably.

• Latency and reliability improve measurably over time.