About the position
What You'll Do
We're looking for a Platform Team Leader to own the foundational systems that power Harmonya's R&D organization. The Platform team is a horizontal, internal-facing team — its customers are the engineers, data scientists, and analysts on our application teams, and its mission is to make them faster, safer, and more productive.
You will lead a team responsible for our production-critical data ingestion (scraping system, data normalization platform), our developer experience surface (Python mono repo, packages and services framework, CI/CD, shared images), our Airflow base layer, and our backoffice. These systems sit on the critical path for production — every other team depends on them, and uptime, incident response, and reliability are core to the role.
This role is for a hands-on technical leader who enjoys both shipping code and growing engineers. You'll spend roughly 50% of your time hands-on writing code, reviewing designs, and the rest leading the team, partnering with peer team leads, and shaping the technical direction of our platform with the VP R&D and CTO.
Responsibilities
- Lead and grow a team of strong backend engineers, owning hiring, mentorship, performance, and personal growth
- Own the team's roadmap end-to-end: scoping, prioritization, delivery, and quality
- Drive the architecture and evolution of the platform layers your team owns — both the data plumbing that feeds Harmonya and the developer-experience surface other R&D teams build on
- Contribute hands-on (~50%) to design, code, code reviews, and production debugging
- Set and uphold engineering standards across the team — code quality, system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence
- Partner closely with peer team leads and the VP R&D to align on shared infrastructure, ownership boundaries, and developer experience
- Lead by example on production incidents and customer-impacting issues
- Influence broader R&D direction as a member of the R&D leadership forum
Requirements
- 3+ years of experience as a team leader in a product-oriented R&D organization
- 6+ years of hands-on Python development experience
- Strong background designing and operating distributed systems and microservices in production
- Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments
- Solid working knowledge of GCP (or equivalent cloud) — Cloud Run, BigQuery, GCS, IAM
- Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines in a microservices / mono repo environment
- Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks
- Proven ability to balance hands-on contribution with team leadership at ~50/50
- Strong sense of ownership, end-to-end accountability, and a builder's mindset
- Excellent collaborator — comfortable working across teams and aligning on shared infrastructure ownership
Advantages
- Experience leading a platform / infrastructure / DevX team specifically (vs. a feature team)
- Working knowledge of Helm charts and Terraform / Terragrunt as a consumer (you don't need to own them, but you should be able to read and reason about them)
- Experience with web scraping systems at scale
- Experience with Python packaging, mono repo tooling, and shared library design
- Comfortable using GenAI tools (Cursor, Claude, etc.) as part of your engineering workflow
- B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent
