About the role
This is a remote position.
The Product Lead Engineer serves as the technical authority across multiple Agile scrum teams inside a vertical product. This role carries no personnel management responsibilities but holds the highest technical voice within the team — setting direction, making implementation calls, and ensuring the team delivers reliable, well-engineered software. Beyond their own contributions, the Product Lead Engineer's output raises the technical capability of everyone around them.
Core Responsibilities
Technical Team Leadership
Serve as the technical authority within the development teams — making implementation decisions, resolving technical disagreements, and ensuring the team operates to a consistently high engineering standard.
Lead end-to-end delivery of complex features across backend, frontend, and mobile platforms — from design through deployment and monitoring — while actively guiding teammates through their portions of the work.
Decompose ambiguous requirements into well-scoped tasks; proactively identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks, and reliability risks.
Regularly and actively contribute production code (player-coach role) as a consistent, high-quality committer who models the engineering standards the rest of the organization is held to.
Technical Leadership & Mentorship
Conduct thorough, constructive code reviews that improve quality and accelerate the growth of junior engineers.
Mentor Software Engineers through pairing, design discussions, and regular technical guidance.
Drive best practices for testing, branching, documentation, and security within the team.
Cross-Functional Collaboration
Collaborate with Product, QA, and Customer Success to clarify requirements, estimate accurately, and deliver reliable features on schedule.
Communicate clearly and proactively about technical risks, progress, and tradeoffs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Technical Ownership & Cross-Training
Take primary ownership of one or more significant product areas — maintaining deep expertise in their architecture, behavior, and failure modes — and serve as the authoritative resource for decisions and issues in those areas.
Proactively lead knowledge transfer of owned areas to teammates so the team can operate effectively without any single engineer becoming a bottleneck.
Actively participate in cross-training led by others, developing meaningful familiarity with product areas outside primary ownership to strengthen overall team resilience.
Required Qualifications
Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience.
5+ years of professional software development experience, including production SaaS environments.
Deep proficiency in PHP and JavaScript / React, including design patterns, performance, and security best practices.
Strong command of relational database design, SQL optimization, and data modeling (MySQL / MariaDB).
Demonstrated ability to mentor and upskill less experienced engineers.
Familiarity with AI-assisted engineering tooling and workflows.
Originally posted on Himalayas