Product Engineering Lead, Keet (100% Remote, Worldwide)
Tether Operations Limited
WorldwideremotePosted 14 days ago
Skill Required
Product-EngineerEngineering-LeadEngineering-ManagerFrontend-EngineerSoftware-EngineerProduct-Engineering-LeadLead-Product-EngineerEngineeringJavaScriptBlockchainCryptographybuildingdesignReactRustAPIsandAIFulltime
Key highlights
- Required experience: Managing engineers/leads shipping consumer products (ideally chat/calling/social apps)
- Key requirement: Deep JavaScript and React
- Notable requirement: Intuition for distributed and local-first systems
Role overview
Tether is pioneering a global financial revolution through reserve-backed tokens, sustainable energy for Bitcoin mining, AI and P2P technology, and digital education. The company is seeking a Product Engineering Lead for Keet, a fully peer-to-peer messaging and video calling app built on Holepunch's P2P stack, with the goal of scaling the product to a billion users to compete with WhatsApp and Telegram. In this role, you will lead the API and frontend teams, reporting directly to the CTO and partnering with product management. You will own the 'how' and the engineering bar, with a workload split of roughly 70% engineering leadership and 30% product, ensuring features are built to a standard that holds up at global scale.
Responsibilities
- Run the API and frontend teams day to day: unblocking, reviewing, and keeping them shipping.
- Set and hold a high engineering bar for performance, reliability, and clean APIs.
- Own the technical design of features and the API surface between Keet's core and the app.
- Make sure the API team works closely with our deep tech teams on code reviews, design, and anything that touches the engine.
- Work alongside Keet's product managers to turn vision and roadmap into scoped, buildable work.
- Push back when scope and reality don't match, and propose better paths when they exist.
- Bring an engineering perspective to product decisions, especially where P2P opens doors that centralized apps can't.
- Help the team move fast, using AI tools and quick prototypes to validate ideas before committing to them.
- Create clarity around team goals and make sure everyone knows what success looks like.
- Mentor team leads to build strong team operating systems, improve how their teams work with others, and grow as leaders.
- Lead by example: roll up your sleeves when the team needs it, and step back when they're ready to own it.
Requirements
- Experience managing engineers or engineering leads who ship consumer product, ideally in chat, calling, or social apps.
- Strong product sense: you can tell a good feature from a busy one.
- Intuition for distributed and local-first systems. Offline-first and eventual consistency should feel natural.
- Deep JavaScript and React.
- Initiative, curiosity, resilience, and the ability to give and receive direct critique.
Nice to have
- Experience with local-first apps, CRDTs or sync engines, offline-capable mobile or desktop apps, or open source.
Additional details
- The API team adds feature-focused APIs to Keet's core, and the frontend team builds the React app on top, each with its own lead.
- Product owns the what and the why; the Product Engineering Lead owns the how and the engineering bar.
- Keet has no servers, no middlemen, and no data harvesting, with end-to-end encryption by design.
- You don't need P2P protocol expertise, because our core abstracts it away.
- Originally posted on Himalayas