Technical Lead

Overview

Technical Lead for the Ocean Visibility and/or Order Inventory Visibility (OV/IV) domains of the FourKites platform. This is an individual contributor technical leadership role, not a people management role, with hands-on coding expected for roughly 40–60% of the week.

What you'll do

• Own the end-to-end technical delivery of your team's roadmap, from breaking epics into sequenced 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 work 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, including SLOs, on-call quality, alert hygiene and root-cause follow-through.
• Own the architecture of your domain, including 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.
• Evaluate frameworks, tools and third-party/partner APIs, deciding what to build, buy or 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 scale: millions of supply chain events a day, across 80+ countries and 1,600+ global brands.
• Define and enforce the team's engineering standards, including coding conventions, test strategy and coverage, PR size and review turnaround, branching, observability and documentation.
• Review code with intent, catching design problems and not just style, and keep review latency low.
• Make quality measurable by tracking change failure rate, revert and hotfix rate, escaped defects, MTTR and cycle time from first commit to production.
• Ensure best practices hold across every engineer on the team, including the newest one.
• Champion secure-by-default, well-instrumented software, with tests, tracing, metrics and alerts treated as part of done.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review, focused on technical growth.
• Give the Engineering Manager and Product Manager a clear, candid read on the team's technical capability and delivery risk.
• Onboard new engineers into the domain quickly and keep domain knowledge written down.
• Participate in hiring as a technical interviewer and calibrate the bar for your domain.
• Translate between engineering and the rest of the business, including 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.

What you'll need

• 8+ years building and operating production software.
• 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, such as 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 identifying risk early.
• Demonstrated ability to lift a team's engineering practices through standards, review and mentorship.
• Excellent written and verbal communication.
• Comfortable with influence rather than authority.
• 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: Graduate from B.E / B.Tech / MCA / M.Tech background.

Nice to have

• Ocean Visibility: experience with ocean and multimodal logistics data, such as container and booking milestones, bills of lading, carrier and NVOCC feeds, terminal and port data, AIS/vessel tracking and customs events.
• Ocean Visibility: familiarity with logistics integration standards and partner ecosystems, such as EDI/EDIFACT, X12, DCSA APIs, INTTRA, CargoSmart, and freight forwarder and carrier APIs.
• Ocean Visibility: experience reconciling messy, late, duplicated or conflicting third-party data into a single source of truth, and building ETA and exception logic on top of it.
• Order Inventory Visibility: experience modelling orders, purchase orders, line items, SKUs and inventory positions, including order-to-shipment and shipment-to-order stitching at high cardinality.
• Order Inventory Visibility: integration experience with enterprise systems of record such as SAP, Oracle, other ERPs, OMS, WMS and TMS platforms, over APIs, flat files and EDI.
• Order Inventory Visibility: 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.

Details

• Location: Chennai or Remote, India.
• This role is not people management: the Engineering Manager owns headcount, performance reviews, compensation and career ladders.