About the role
YGO.ai is a VC-funded AI tourism platform looking for a Team Lead for one of our product engineering pods: a hands-on engineer who uses AI to ship fast and acts as the face of their pod towards clients and leadership.
⚠️IMPORTANT: This is not a traditional coding role. You'll use Claude Code and other AI tools to 10x your output, always thinking about how the product or feature you are working on benefits the user. Also: we have no QA team, you OWN the quality of what you ship!
🧭About this role: every engineer at YGO already owns their work end-to-end (IC + DRI). Everyone in the pod is, in effect, their own architect and lead developer. So this role is not about being the strongest techie in the room or telling people how to build.
A Team Lead at YGO is the spokesperson, coordinator and facilitator for their pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients. You come from the management path, not the deep-specialist path: you have seen a lot as a developer and have consciously decided that enabling a team, working with clients and driving product outcomes is what energises you now, not coding all day.
You remain a hands-on engineer. Expect roughly 30-40% of your week on coordination, client and product work, and the rest as an individual contributor. This is not an HR-style people-management role: no performance reviews, no career coaching. As we scale, light one-on-ones and check-ins may become part of it, but the job is coordination and delivery, not administration.
🧑💻 What you'll actually do:
Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partners
Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs (lightweight project management, we deliberately have no project managers)
Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod so nothing gets lost in translation
Represent your pod in product planning sessions and bring a strong product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offs
Help pod members with product decisions and prioritisation, enabling engineers who may be technically stronger than you
Contribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, review AI output for quality and architectural fit
Join client meetings to align on requirements, report on delivery and keep the relationship professional and calm
📚 Our stack:
Backend: Go monorepo (no framework, 3+ services)
Hosting: PaaS-managed containers, local setup fully mirrors production via Docker Compose
Tools: Jaeger tracing, Betterstack (Logging, Alerting), Redis Asynq queue
Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis
AI tooling: Claude Code (mandatory)
🚢 Products you will lead a pod on:
An AI search & recommendation engine for major travel enterprises: heavy client integration work (SSO, security reviews, GDS integrations) with demanding enterprise customers
A content enrichment API: high-scale, data- and AI-focused backend work
Partner and supplier integrations, data ingestion pipelines, LLM providers
✅ You must have:
2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit (a hard must, think team lead or early-stage engineering manager)
A developer's background: you have seen production reality with your own hands before moving towards leading people
A genuinely product-driven mindset: you think about user value and business outcomes before implementation
Comfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authority
Willingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of your pod
Excellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates and client conversations
Ownership mentality with a strive for elegantly simple, high-quality solutions; you test your own work thoroughly since we have no QA team
Proven experience using Claude Code, share specific examples
Solid Golang experience, you'll review AI's code and you must understand how it works
Ability to do on-call once in a while to help maintain our platform's reliability & uptime
⚠️ European or African timezones (±3 hours from CET)
Available full-time (40 hours/week)
❤️ You are a great fit if you:
Made the classic developer's fork-in-the-road decision, lifelong engineer or leading people, and chose people, clients and product
Are energised by product planning sessions and have opinions about what the pod should build next, not just how
Are comfortable being the face of your pod, in internal planning rooms and on calls with enterprise clients
Enjoy enabling engineers who are technically stronger than you
Ship fast but always verify it actually works; think "how can AI build this?" as your first instinct
Get frustrated when development takes weeks instead of days
‼️🙅 Red flags (don't apply if):
This would be your first leadership role
You see the lead as the chief architect who makes the technical decisions for the team
You are looking for an HR-focused people-management role built around performance reviews and career coaching
You want to lead a team without staying hands-on in the codebase
You would rather not take part in client meetings or stakeholder-facing conversations
You prefer to focus on execution and leave product planning to others
You rely on formal authority to get a team moving
You have never used Claude Code or similar AI coding tools
You are outside European/African timezones
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