Engineering Team Lead

Fuelfinance is a fintech startup building an AI finance platform for early-stage startups. They are looking for an Engineering Team Lead to build and lead a new team for a new enterprise product line. The role is a player-coach with ~50% hands-on coding and ~50% leadership.

• 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

• 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
• Will be a plus: Fintech background or experience on security-focused projects
• Will be a plus: Knowledge of one of the following: Go, Python
• Will be a plus: Early-stage startup experience
• Will be a plus: Experience with infrastructure setup

• 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