Engineering Team Lead

Who are we? Fuelfinance is on a mission to revolutionize financial management for early-stage startups, empowering them to take control of their finances and thrive. We recently raised $1M in Seed Funding from top-tier investors like Markus Villig (Bolt), John S. Kim (SendBird), Stratmind, and Bad Ideas funds, following 3 years of profitable, bootstrapped success. Trusted by businesses with over $200M in P&L, including Reface, Petcube, and Hampton, we've built a universal tool that brings clarity and insight to finance management. With 38% of startups failing due to cash flow issues, our goal is to prevent these failures and unlock trillions in GDP growth. At Fuelfinance, we're not just creating software — we're safeguarding the future of thousands of startups. Join us and be part of this impact! fuelfinance.me www.instagram.com/fuelfinance youtu.be/eI5VH2Ks9o4 Who are we searching for? We're looking for an Engineering Team Lead to build and lead a new engineering team working on a new enterprise product line on top of the Fuelfinance AI finance platform. This is a player-coach role: roughly half of your time is hands-on engineering, the other half is leading — architecture, planning, hiring, and growing people. You start with a team of one senior engineer and help hire the rest. You are the technical decision-maker for this direction and are accountable for what it ships. The team You'll build a new team inside R&D. You'll report to the Head of Engineering and work closely with the core product team ( 5 engineers, 1 QA ), the Product Director , and the C-level team . What will you build? A new enterprise product line on top of the Fuelfinance platform (details are shared during the interview process) The architecture that lets it reuse and extend the core platform: AI finance agents, MCP infrastructure and agent orchestration, integrations with accounting platforms, banks, and payment systems (QuickBooks, Xero, Stripe), access controls, and reporting The team itself: hiring, onboarding, engineering practices, and standards What are your responsibilities? Lead a small engineering team as a player-coach — ~50% hands-on coding and reviews, ~50% architecture, planning, and people Own the architecture of the product line — make and defend design decisions, keep them aligned with the core platform, drive System Design Reviews Own delivery and be accountable for outcomes — plan, estimate, raise risks early, ship fast without cutting corners that matter Hold the quality bar — testing strategy, code review standards, observability, and incident response are your responsibility Hire and grow the team — take part in hiring, run 1:1s, give regular feedback, develop engineers along our seniority grading Be a product partner — work directly with the Product Director and stakeholders, understand customer problems, push back on scope when needed Set the standard for AI-native engineering — agentic coding workflows, proper codebase context, end-to-end verification — and make it the team's default Keep security and data integrity at the core of everything — we handle customers' financial data Protect the team's culture — ownership, direct communication, honest feedback What are the preferred requirements for the role? 7+ years of software engineering experience, including 2+ years leading a team with real accountability for delivery Experience building products or systems from scratch and taking them to production with a small team Proficiency with AI-assisted development (a must) — not just chat-based usage: you build agentic coding workflows, feed the right codebase context to models, and verify AI output with end-to-end testing Proficiency in both frontend and backend development TypeScript, Node.js (Nest.js), React SQL, MongoDB AWS knowledge Strong system design skills — you design for scale, security, and maintainability and can explain trade-offs to non-engineers Experience hiring and mentoring engineers Experience enhancing system and infrastructure security B2/C1 English level Comfortable with startup mode : shifting priorities, fast pace, high ownership Will be a plus: Experience with LLM APIs in production (Anthropic, OpenAI), RAG, agents, or evals Fintech background or experience on security-focused projects Knowledge of one of the following: Go, Python Early-stage startup experience Experience with infrastructure setup Recruitment Process: Soft skills interview System Design & Experience Review Leadership & Management interview Culture fit interview Why work with us? Build a new product line from day one — architecture, team, and practices are yours to shape Real leadership scope early — you own a direction and work directly with the Product Director and C-level Build the future of finance work — design AI-native finance products, not just maintain them Rapid skills improvement Growth opportunities according to our seniority grading (it comes with a compensation increase) Flexible schedule and time-off policy 18 days of paid vacation per year , paid sick leaves