What You'll Own :

Team & Culture :

- Build, hire, and develop a high-performing full-stack engineering team including setting the bar for what "high-performing" means at SolarSquare.

- Create genuine career growth paths for engineers.

- Maintain team health, retention, and motivation through periods of rapid change and ambiguity.

Technical Strategy :

- Define and drive the architectural roadmap.

- Make and own technical bets : when to invest in platform, when to ship fast, when to pay down debt.

- Establish observability, reliability, and security standards before they become production fires.

Delivery :

- Translate business goals into engineering priorities and push back when the translation is wrong.

- Set clear goals, metrics, and delivery expectations; hold yourself and the team accountable to them.

- Manage trade-offs between short-term product velocity and long-term engineering health.

Cross-Functional Influence :

- Partner with Product, Design, and Business stakeholders and influence decisions upstream.

- Communicate technical risk, cost, and complexity clearly to non-technical leadership.

What We're Looking For :

- 7-10 years of engineering experience, with at least 3 years leading teams.

- Strong understanding of distributed systems design : idempotency, retries, DLQs, circuit breakers, eventual consistency, you've had to debug these in production.

- Proven experience with event-driven architecture and Kafka including schema design, consumer group management, and failure recovery patterns.

- Comfort with relational (PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis) databases including query optimisation and schema design decisions at scale.

- You've designed or operated systems handling meaningful traffic ideally 10K+ RPS, significant daily transaction volumes, or consumer-scale user bases (1M+ users).

- You understand what 99.99% uptime actually costs to maintain and you've made the infrastructure and on-call decisions to back it.

- You've written or enforced SLOs, SLAs, and incident management processes.

- You've done a postmortem that changed something real about how the team operates.

- Hands-on experience with AWS, GCP, or Azure beyond just deploying services, cost optimisation, right-sizing, architecture decisions that meaningfully reduced spend.

- Working knowledge of containerisation (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes) enough to unblock your team.

- CI/CD pipeline ownership you've built or significantly improved a pipeline.

- Experience with observability tooling : Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, ELK, or equivalent and more importantly, a philosophy about what to instrument and why.

- You've made the call between monolith and microservices and you can defend it with context.

- You've managed technical debt consciously : triaged it, prioritised it, and made the case to stakeholders for when to pay it down.

- You've navigated a hard conversation with a product or business stakeholder and changed the outcome.

- Your engineers grow under you. You can point to people you've promoted, coached, or unblocked.

- You know how to build alignment across functions where incentives don't naturally align.

- You have clear examples of decisions you made under ambiguity and you can articulate the trade-offs you weighed.

- You've identified a systemic problem and fixed it without being asked.

- You've built or rebuilt something that wasn't working a team, a process, a system.