Technical Lead
FourKites
IndiaremotePosted 3 days ago
Skill Required
Technical-LeadSoftware-EngineerBackend-EngineerStaff-EngineerPrincipal-EngineerTechnical-Lead-EngineerTechnical-Engineering-LeadTechnical-Team-LeadTechnical-LeaderTechnical-Development-LeadTechnical-Lead-ManagerTechnical-Project-LeadSenior-Technical-LeadIT-Technical-LeadTechnical LeadSystem DesignQuery OptimizationData WarehousingSpring BootMicroservicesObservabilityEngineeringPostgreSQLJiradesigningbuildingwrittendesignKafkaRedisCI/CDAgilejQueryJavaAPIsSQLAWSGitandGoFulltime
Key highlights
- 8+ years experience required
- 2+ years as tech lead/staff engineer
- Competitive compensation with stock options
- 36 PTO days plus 5 recharge days
- Backend expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Go
- AWS, Kafka, and PostgreSQL experience
Role overview
FourKites is hiring a Technical Lead for its most data-intensive platform areas: Ocean Visibility and/or Order Inventory Visibility (OV/IV). In this role, you will serve as the engineering owner of your team’s delivery, setting technical direction and maintaining high engineering standards while remaining hands-on in the code 40–60% of the time. This is explicitly not a people management role; you will own the technical and delivery outcomes, while the Engineering Manager handles headcount, performance reviews, compensation, and career ladders.
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end technical delivery of your team’s roadmap — from breaking down an epic into sequenced, atomic units of work through to production release.
- Partner with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager to shape scope, sequence work realistically and say no to the things that will not fit.
- Run sprint-level execution: identify risk early, surface and clear blockers, and keep commitments honest and predictable.
- Be the single technical point of accountability when a release slips, a migration goes sideways or a customer escalation lands on the team.
- Drive production health for your services — SLOs, on-call quality, alert hygiene, and root-cause follow-through rather than repeat firefighting.
- Own the architecture of your domain: service boundaries, data models, event contracts and integration patterns, aligned with the FourKites North Star architecture.
- Write and review design documents; make the calls that need making and document the trade-offs behind them.
- Evaluate frameworks, tools and third-party/partner APIs; decide what we build, what we buy and what we integrate.
- Maintain a live view of technical debt in your domain and negotiate a steady share of roadmap capacity to pay it down.
- Design for the scale we actually run at — millions of supply chain events a day, across 80+ countries and 1,600+ global brands.
- Define and enforce the team’s engineering standards: coding conventions, test strategy and coverage expectations, PR size and review turnaround, branching, observability and documentation.
- Review code with intent — catch design problems, not just style — and keep review latency low so the team stays unblocked.
- Make quality measurable. Watch and improve the signals that matter: change failure rate, revert and hotfix rate, escaped defects, MTTR, cycle time from first commit to production.
- Raise the floor, not just the ceiling: make sure best practices hold across every engineer on the team, including the newest one.
- Champion secure-by-default and well-instrumented software — tests, tracing, metrics and alerts are part of done, not a follow-up ticket.
- Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review — technical growth, with career growth left to the Engineering Manager.
- Give the EM and PM a clear, unvarnished read on the team’s technical capability and delivery risk.
- Onboard new engineers into the domain quickly, and keep the domain knowledge written down rather than resident in one head.
- Participate in hiring as a technical interviewer and calibrate the bar for your domain.
- Translate between engineering and the rest of the business — Product, Implementation, Customer Engineering, Support and, when needed, the customer.
- Coordinate with tech leads in adjacent domains (OTR, Appointment Manager, Platform, AI Agents) on shared contracts and cross-team dependencies.
- Represent your domain in architecture reviews and platform-level decisions.
Requirements
- 8+ years building and operating production software, including 2+ years as a tech lead, staff engineer or equivalent leading a team’s technical delivery.
- Deep backend expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Go, with strong fundamentals in distributed systems and object-oriented design.
- Hands-on experience designing microservices and event-driven systems — Kafka or similar — including idempotency, ordering, replay and failure handling.
- Strong data modelling and SQL skills on PostgreSQL (or equivalent), plus practical experience with caching (Redis) and query/performance tuning at scale.
- Production experience on AWS with containerised deployments, CI/CD and modern observability tooling.
- A track record of shipping complex, multi-quarter work on time — and of being the person who found the risk early.
- Demonstrated ability to lift a team’s engineering practices, not just your own output, through standards, review and mentorship.
- Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a design doc an executive and a junior engineer both understand.
- Comfortable with influence rather than authority: you get the team to a better answer without owning anyone’s performance review.
- Fluent in Agile delivery and the tooling around it (Jira, Confluence, Git branching and rebasing).
- Comfortable working with a distributed US–India team and with customers directly.
- Education Qualification: Graduate from B.E/ B.Tech / MCA / M.Tech Background.
Nice to have
- For the Ocean Visibility: Experience with ocean and multimodal logistics data — container and booking milestones, bills of lading, carrier and NVOCC feeds, terminal and port data, AIS/vessel tracking, customs events.
- For the Ocean Visibility: Familiarity with logistics integration standards and partner ecosystems (EDI/EDIFACT, X12, DCSA APIs, INTTRA, CargoSmart, freight forwarder and carrier APIs).
- For the Ocean Visibility: Experience reconciling messy, late, duplicated or conflicting third-party data into a single trustworthy source of truth — and building the ETA and exception logic on top of it.
- For the Order Inventory Visibility role: Experience modelling orders, purchase orders, line items, SKUs and inventory positions — including order-to-shipment and shipment-to-order stitching at high cardinality.
- For the Order Inventory Visibility role: Integration experience with enterprise systems of record: SAP, Oracle, other ERPs, OMS, WMS and TMS platforms, over APIs, flat files and EDI.
- For the Order Inventory Visibility role: Experience building a real-time digital twin over order and inventory data, including OTIF, fill-rate and inventory-in-motion analytics.
- Prior work in supply chain, logistics or another high-volume B2B enterprise SaaS domain.
- Experience leading a large-scale migration, re-platforming or domain decomposition.
- Practical use of AI coding tools to raise team throughput without lowering the quality bar.
- Experience in a high-growth product organisation with enterprise customers.
Benefits
- Competitive compensation with stock options
- Medical benefits start on first day of employment
- 36 PTO days (Sick, Casual and Earned)
- 5 global recharge days
- 2 volunteer days
- Parental leave for all parents
- Annual wellness stipend
- Home Office setups and Technology reimbursement
- Lifestyle & Family benefits
- Annual Swags/ Festive Swags
- Ongoing learning & development opportunities (Professional development program, Toast Master club etc.)
Additional details
- Originally posted on Himalayas
- FourKites processes over 3.2 million supply chain events daily — from purchase orders to final delivery — helping 1,600-plus global brands.