Technical Lead

At DEVLEAPS, we help teams ship better software with less friction. We're looking for a Tech Lead – Engineering Excellence who thrives at the intersection of hands-on technical leadership and strategic consultancy — someone who can steer architecture decisions in the morning, pair with an engineer in the afternoon, and sit across from a Product Manager at the end of the day to make sense of it all.

What you'll do

• Lead technical direction on client engagements: own architecture decisions, set engineering standards, and ensure solutions are built to last across Kubernetes/AKS, event streaming, CI/CD, security, and AI/ML-ready platforms.
• Serve as the trusted technical voice for clients: challenge assumptions, shape roadmaps, and help senior stakeholders understand trade-offs without drowning them in jargon.
• Embed as a technical anchor in client teams: guide engineers through design and implementation, raise the collective bar through code reviews, pairing, and structured feedback.
• Drive modernisation at scale: supported migrations from on-prem, monolith, and ESB landscapes towards microservices, domain-driven, and event-driven architectures with a clear plan, not just a vision.
• Own the technical narrative: facilitate architecture reviews, run engineering workshops, and translate complex system challenges into clear options, trade-offs, and decisions.
• Remove what slows teams down: identify systemic bottlenecks in tooling, process, or architecture and work with client leadership to actually fix them.

You are

• A seasoned engineer who has led: you've made architectural calls, mentored engineers, and owned outcomes, not just delivered tickets.
• A consultant at heart: you ask before you prescribe, push back with evidence, and know that the best technical solution is sometimes not the first one you thought of.
• Comfortable with ambiguity and politics: you can navigate competing stakeholder interests, legacy constraints, and shifting priorities without losing momentum.
• A multiplier: you measure success by how much better the team around you gets, not just by what you personally shipped.
• Human: you have opinions, sharp questions, hobbies, maybe a questionable taste in snacks. That's fine, we're a little bit geeky and proud of it.

You'll bring

• 6–10+ years of software and/or DevOps engineering experience, with at least a few years in a lead or principal capacity.
• A track record of leading technical delivery on real-world, complex systems: services, data pipelines, integrations, AI/ML workloads, or platform engineering.

Engineering foundations

• Deep understanding of software design principles, distributed systems, and architectural patterns (DDD, EDA, microservices, API design).
• Strong instincts around code quality, testing strategy, observability, and production reliability.

Cloud & DevOps

• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform (preferably Azure), including networking, identity, security, and managed services at scale.
• Solid grasp of CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code, and automation. You've built and maintained these, not just used them.
• Kubernetes/AKS experience at a level where you can make architectural and operational decisions, not just run workloads.

Leadership & consultancy

• Experience leading engineering teams or workstreams: setting direction, unblocking people, and holding technical quality.
• Proven consultancy skills: stakeholder management, facilitating difficult conversations, and delivering clear recommendations under pressure.
• Comfortable operating across organisational levels, from pairing with a junior engineer to advising a VP of Engineering.

How you work

• You don't need a methodology religion. You know when to lean on structure and when to cut through it. Scrum, Kanban, something in between: you read the room and help teams find a rhythm that actually works for them.
• You've collaborated in messy, multi-team environments with different vendors, different cultures, and different definitions of "done", and you know how to find common ground without losing your standards.
• You think in systems, not tickets: you care about how the team works together as much as what they ship.

Language

• Dutch fluent, English professional.