Lead Engineer

About the Role

This role blends project management with strong architecture and engineering leadership. You'll guide day-to-day delivery planning, sprints, releases while staying close to the codebase to make sound architectural calls and keep quality high across the team. This role leads with the delivery/ownership angle and treats the technical depth as a strength you bring to that.

Major Roles & Responsibilities

Delivery & Sprint Management

• Keep the team unblocked, and own sprint planning task splitting, ticket creation, estimation, meetings, and prioritization in coordination with product/founders
• Own release planning and ensure features ship on committed timelines; flag slippage early with a recovery plan, not just a status update
• Track velocity and delivery predictability over time, and adjust planning based on what's actually achievable

Technical Leadership

• Own architecture and technical design across the product.
• Set coding standards and technical direction across the Next.js, Node.js/TypeScript stack

Code Review & Quality Ownership

• Review code on every significant PR — not a rubber stamp, but a real gate before merge
• Enforce test coverage standards, static analysis/linting, and QA sign-off before releases, especially for booking/payroll logic where bugs directly impact clients or compensation
• Own CI/CD pipeline health and drive incident response/postmortems when things break in production

Hands-on Development

• Write production code where needed — this role stays technical, not purely coordinative
• Lead complex features end-to-end and debug critical production issues

People & Team Leadership

• Mentor engineers through code review and pairing, not just ticket assignment
• Surface team blockers, skill gaps, and workload issues before they become delivery risk
• Participate in hiring/interviewing as the team scales

Data Privacy & Compliance (Mental Health Domain)

• Own security posture for highly sensitive data — therapy session records, client mental health history, personal identifiers
• Ensure compliance with India's DPDP Act and healthcare-data best practices; design access controls so clinical data is need-to-know only
• Implement encryption, audit logging, and secure data retention/deletion policies for client records

Reliability for a 24/7 Care Service

• Design and own on-call/incident processes appropriate for a service where downtime can mean a missed therapy session
• Own background job reliability (notifications, reminders, payroll runs) via the dedicated jobs service
• Set up monitoring/alerting for booking failures, missed session reminders, and video-session (Google Meet) failures

Requirements

• 3-8+ years software engineering experience, with 1-2+ years directly owning delivery (sprint planning, release ownership) — not just individual contribution
• Strong backend expertise in Next.js, Node.js/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, and REST API design (Express + Sequelize preferred)
• Proven track record of shipping on committed timelines in a small team
• Startup experience preferred — comfortable with ambiguity and a lean team
• Sensitivity to handling personal/health data responsibly