Engineering Team Lead

About the employer:

​​​​​Our client is a US-based startup building an AI-powered platform that digitizes and extracts intelligence from car dealership documents — helping dealers cut audit response time from hours to seconds and surface compliance gaps before regulators do.

We're hiring an Engineering Team Lead to anchor day-to-day delivery for their founding engineering team. You'll partner with the U.S.-based Product Owner on what to build and make sure it gets built — on time, at quality, and to the bar dealership customers and their auditors will accept.

This is a technical delivery role, not a hands-on engineering role. Your job is to make the engineering team as effective as possible, own CI/CD, testing, and release management, and be the technical voice the U.S. side of the company can trust. Early-stage, real ownership, real impact.

What will you work on?:

• Own the full agile delivery cycle: daily standups, sprint planning, backlog refinement, reviews, and retrospectives ensuring the team ships predictably and on schedule

• Convert Product Owner priorities and customer needs into well-scoped engineering stories with clear acceptance criteria, and defend trade-offs when scope and time collide

• Take end-to-end ownership of the Smart AI Audit Check product, driving feature-by-feature, release-by-release delivery against the roadmap

• Own the CI/CD pipeline (GitHub Actions or equivalent), release cadence, and deployment process including quality gates, release cuts, and post-release validation

• Define and enforce the engineering quality bar: coverage targets, regression discipline, automated test gates, and eval baselines for the AI layer tracking all defects to root cause

• Track and report on velocity, defect rate, deployment frequency, lead time, and incident response weekly to the CEO, monthly to the founding team

• Lead delivery-layer PR reviews focused on story alignment, test presence, documentation, and scope discipline

• Own operational documentation, deployment runbooks, and incident playbooks building the institutional knowledge the team needs as it scales

• Keep the CEO informed on delivery risks and trade-offs, represent the technical side on US customer calls and demos, and push back constructively when needed

What Skills And Experience Are We Looking For?:

• 5+ years owning delivery of B2B SaaS products as a Technical Delivery Lead, Engineering Manager, Senior Scrum Master, Technical Product Manager, or a hands-on Tech Lead who moved into delivery

• Demonstrated ownership of a production SaaS release pipeline — you have set up or operated CI/CD (GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, CircleCI, or similar) and owned the deployment cadence end-to-end

• Defined and enforced a testing strategy in a real environment — coverage targets, automated regression suites, release gates, and defect triage

• Comfortable reading code in Python and JavaScript/TypeScript well enough to do high-level PR review, ask sharp questions about scope and test coverage, and triage incidents

• Strong agile/scrum practice — sprint planning, backlog refinement, velocity and quality metrics, and the judgment to know which ceremonies add value and which add noise

• Track record shipping production SaaS end-to-end on small teams (≤10 engineers) with limited oversight

• Comfortable joining U.S. customer calls, answering technical feasibility questions, and representing engineering credibly to non-engineers

• Be self-directed — take a vague problem and return with a working answer, without daily supervision

• Thrive in an early-stage environment — comfortable with ambiguity, shifting priorities, and writing the playbook rather than following one

Nice to have:

• Earlier career as a software engineer — even if you have not coded professionally in years, the foundation matters.

• Experience delivering products that integrate AI/LLMs — RAG, document intelligence, evals — from a delivery or PM seat.

• Experience in a regulated SaaS environment (SOC 2, GLBA, HIPAA, financial services, automotive F&I) — you know what audit-grade documentation and release discipline actually look like.

• Formal Scrum / Product Owner certification (CSM, CSPO, SAFe), or equivalent demonstrated practice.

• Prior founding-team or first-five experience at a startup.

• Familiarity with the U.S. automotive dealership ecosystem — DMS platforms (Tekion, Reynolds & Reynolds, CDK, Dealertrack), F&I, or compliance-adjacent work.

What we offer:

• Format: 100% Remote.

• Working hours: 12:00 PM – 9:00 PM (Georgia time / GET), Monday to Friday.

• Employment type: Official employment under the Labor Code of Georgia (Georgian Labor Law).

• Benefits: Private Health Insurance (DMS).