Technical Lead Manager

About the Role

We're looking for a Tech Lead Manager to lead a squad of 4–8 engineers. This is a player-coach role: you'll stay hands-on technically (40–60% IC work) while owning your team's delivery, quality, and people development.

At this level, you're the first-line manager for your squad—running 1:1s, giving feedback, coaching careers, and building a culture of ownership and psychological safety. You're also still in the code, making technical decisions and shipping alongside your team.

What You'll Do

People & Team (40–60%)

• Build the team — Hire and onboard E1–E3 engineers

• Develop your people — Run effective 1:1s, give direct feedback, write performance reviews, and coach career growth

• Foster culture — Build psychological safety, ownership, and accountability within the squad

• Shield the team — Remove blockers, handle noise, and keep the squad focused on delivery

Technical (40–60%)

• Stay hands-on — Write code, review PRs, and contribute to technical decisions

• Own delivery — Ensure the squad delivers on commitments with high quality and predictable velocity

• Drive quality — Champion testing, observability, and engineering best practices

• Handle incidents — Own squad-level incidents and postmortems

• Leverage AI — Use AI tools daily for code reviews, design drafts, and debugging; teach the squad effective AI usage

Planning & Alignment

• Run the squad — Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives

• Align with product — Partner with PMs and designers to translate requirements into deliverable work

• Communicate up — Represent the squad in planning, cross-team syncs, and leadership discussions

What We're Looking For

Experience

• 4+ years in software engineering

• 1+ years managing or leading a team (formal or informal)

Technical

• Strong technical background—you can guide architecture discussions and code reviews

• Familiar with modern development practices: CI/CD, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), observability

• Comfortable with our stack or similar: Java/Spring, Angular/React, PostgreSQL, AWS, DataDog

• Still enjoys being in the code and staying technically sharp

AI Fluency

• Uses AI tools (Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT) daily for code reviews, design drafts, and debugging

• Teaches squad effective AI usage and best practices

• Experiments with AI to accelerate team delivery and quality

Leadership & People

• Experience running 1:1s and giving direct, kind feedback

• Track record of developing engineers and helping them grow

• Servant leadership mindset—you enable others to do their best work

• Builds trust, psychological safety, and ownership culture

Communication

• Clear communicator with engineers, PMs, and leadership

• Sets expectations and provides continuous feedback

• Working knowledge of English for cross-team collaboration (required)

Mindset

• Comfortable balancing people and technical responsibilities

• Thrives in ambiguity; makes smart trade-offs with incomplete information

• Cares about both business outcomes and engineering excellence

Nice to Have

• Experience in fintech, payments, or high-growth startups

• Background scaling or building teams from scratch

• Familiarity with engineering career frameworks and coaching practices

• On-call and incident management experience

Our Stack

Java/Spring, Python, Go · Angular, React · PostgreSQL, MongoDB · AWS (ECS, Lambda) · DataDog · Pulumi · Jenkins

Why Aplazo

Our mission is to empower financial access and opportunity across Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent solutions. Our tech vision: be the most beloved and innovative tech organization in Latin America.

We're a Series B fintech growing fast—you'll build and lead a team that ships products reaching millions of customers.

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Aplazo does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sex, gender, age, ethnic or national origin, marital status, disability, social or economic status, sexual preferences, or any other condition or characteristic. Selection is based solely on the qualifications and merits of the candidates.

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