Founding Engineering Team Lead (HandsOn)

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and grow a small, high-performing engineering team while remaining hands-on

• Design, build, and review production backend and platform code alongside the team

• Own delivery of the engineering roadmap, balancing speed, quality, and security

• Act as a technical leader by setting architecture direction and enforcing engineering standards

• Contribute directly to critical features, integrations, and platform foundations

• Establish lightweight engineering processes that enable fast execution without bureaucracy

• Mentor engineers through code reviews, pairing, and technical guidance

• Contribute hands-on in design and build architecture, configure systems, code 70% of the time in GoLang.

• Remove blockers and unblock delivery across backend, frontend, data, and DevOps

• Collaborate closely with CEO, CPTO, and product leadership on technical and execution decisions

• Support hiring, onboarding, and technical evaluation of engineers

• Foster a culture of ownership, pragmatism, and low ego

• Build whole Security platform setup from scratch

• Partner closely with backend and AI engineers to design secure service boundaries and deployment models

• Troubleshoot and resolve complex production incidents across infrastructure, networking, and application layers

• Build PoCs and validate infrastructure and security design decisions in an early-stage environment

• Support compliance readiness by enabling controls, logging, and evidence collection for security frameworks

• Continuously improve platform cost efficiency, reliability, and operational maturity

• This role reports directly to CEO & CPTO

Must have skills

• 10+ years of professional software engineering experience

• 3+ years of experience leading engineering teams while remaining hands-on

• 3+ years of GoLang experience

• 3+ years experience with AWS in production environments

• Strong code quality bar and experience with architectural reviews

• Ability to context-switch between technical topics and people leadership

• Strong execution mindset and comfort operating under ambiguity

• Hands-on coding mentality; can build things from scratch including security architecture yourself

• Hands-on experience with Docker, Kubernetes (EKS) and containerized workloads

• Experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions or similar)

• Experience with monitoring, logging, observability (Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus)

• Experience with Coding CoPilots (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, AWS CodeWhisperer, Codex, etc.)

• Knowledge of Experience supporting production SaaS platforms

• High ownership mentality, startup mindset, and ability to move quickly

• Experience in startup or scale-up environments

• Low ego, high commitment, and a true tech startup mentality

• Excellent English communication skills

Nice-to-have requirements

• Previous experience as a founding or early-stage Engineering Manager

• Experience in cybersecurity, identity, or enterprise SaaS platforms

• Exposure to DevOps, SRE, or data engineering

• Experience scaling teams and systems simultaneously

• Experience with security architecture, identity security, or security engineering

• Familiarity with compliance frameworks (NIS2, DORA, ISO 27001, SOC 2)

• Understanding of OAuth/OIDC, API tokens, IdP, scopes, SSO, SCIM, roles, RBAC/ABAC, service accounts

• Familiarity with cloud identity and security controls (e.g. IAM, CloudTrail, Azure Active Directory / Entra ID)

• Hands-on with SIEM platforms such as Splunk, Microsoft Sentinel, or IBM QRadar

• Experience designing permission models, identity graphs, or access control frameworks

• Knowledge of tokenization, Zero Trust principles, least privilege, and continuous verification

• Experience with Security related to AI/LLM systems, agent logic, or willingness to learn fast

• Familiarity with AI agent behavior, LLM security, or agent sandboxing

• Previous experience in cybersecurity, identity startups

• You are a fan of rock or metal music

• Excellent German communication skills