Lead Developer (Remote)

About the Role

We are seeking an experienced Lead Developer to remotely oversee the engineering team's delivery processes. This position focuses on technical leadership rather than just people management—transforming product concepts into deployable features. You will collaborate with the Product team to finalize and scope out requirements, decompose them into actionable tasks, assign workloads across frontend, mobile, backend, and AI engineers, remove obstacles daily, and ensure timely and high-quality releases.

Primary Responsibilities

• Manage the full delivery cycle, from requirement finalization through design, task decomposition, sprint execution, to release.
• Partner with Product to refine unclear requirements into clear, estimable, and technical specifications before development.
• Define sprint scopes, establish achievable timelines, and communicate progress, risks, and compromises proactively to stakeholders.
• Ensure release quality by enforcing code reviews, testing protocols, and production readiness standards.
• Assign and prioritize tasks to team members based on skills, availability, and project priorities.
• Rapidly identify and resolve both technical blockers (architecture decisions, third-party API challenges, infrastructure) and process issues (ambiguous requirements, cross-team dependencies).
• Conduct daily standups, sprint planning sessions, and retrospectives, maintaining team focus and minimizing distractions.
• Mentor engineers via code reviews, pair programming, and design discussions to advance technical excellence.
• Contribute hands-on code to critical or complex system components and influence architectural decisions, including API design, data modeling, caching strategies, queueing, and service boundaries.
• Design and assess integrations with third-party APIs such as travel, payments, messaging, and calendar services.
• Promote automation throughout the software development lifecycle, covering CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, infrastructure as code, and internal workflow automations.

Technology Stack

• Frontend: React (web) and React Native (mobile) focusing on component-driven architecture, shared codebases, and modern state management.
• Mobile: React Native (iOS prioritized) including native module integrations, deep linking, and app store deployment.
• Backend: Node.js powering RESTful and event-driven microservices.
• AI Services: Python with FastAPI handling large language model orchestration, agent-driven workflows, and retrieval-augmented generation pipelines.
• Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis employing a polyglot persistence approach across transactional, document, and caching layers.
• Infrastructure: Amazon Web Services including ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, RDS, SQS/SNS, CloudWatch.
• Automation: Strong emphasis on workflow automation, continuous integration/delivery, and AI agent-driven task execution.

Candidate Profile

Essential Qualifications:

• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience with a minimum of 2 years in a leadership role or as a tech lead for critical delivery projects.
• Proficient in Node.js backend development and React frontend applications; hands-on experience or strong lead capability in React Native mobile development.
• Working knowledge of Python, particularly in building or reviewing FastAPI services.
• Experienced designing scalable database schemas, indexes, and caching strategies for PostgreSQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
• Practical AWS expertise encompassing deployment, scaling, monitoring, and optimizing production workloads.
• Demonstrated success in delivering features from rough product concepts to production, including scoping, estimation, task breakdown, and delivery management.
• Excellent communication skills enabling challenge to product decisions with data, conveying trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders, and giving clear technical direction to developers.
• Effective in unblocking teams by debugging across the tech stack, making pragmatic architectural decisions, and negotiating scope under tight deadlines.

Valuable Additional Experience:

• Familiarity with highly automated systems such as workflow engines (e.g., n8n, Temporal, Airflow), browser or task automation, or agentic AI pipelines.
• Experience working on LLM-powered products including prompt engineering, retrieval-augmented generation, vector databases, agent orchestration frameworks (LangGraph, LangChain), and LLM observability tools (LangFuse, Datadog).
• Knowledge of event-driven architectures and message queues like SQS, Kafka, or RabbitMQ.
• Proficient integrating third-party APIs at scale, especially payments (Stripe), messaging (WhatsApp/Twilio), travel, or calendar providers.
• Skill in infrastructure as code (Terraform, AWS CDK) and container orchestration with Docker and Kubernetes/EKS.
• Experience shipping React Native apps to app stores utilizing Expo, native modules, deep linking, or OTA updates.
• Background working in fast-paced startup or 0→1 product environments.

Benefits

• Competitive remuneration aligned with skills and experience.
• Opportunity to build a pioneering AI product from the UAE for a worldwide audience.
• High degree of ownership within a small, agile team where your decisions impact hundreds of thousands of users.
• Use of modern development tools and an engineering culture centered on automation.