Job Title: Engineering Technical Lead

Company Name: Insomnia Labs

Job Details: Hiring,Remotely,in,New,York,,NY,In-Office,or,Remote,6-10,Annually,Senior,level

Job Url: https://builtin.com/job/engineering-technical-lead/7803829

Job Description: Engineering Technical Lead — CreatorFi (Platform/Infra)
Remote — must align with 9:00am–5:00pm Eastern Time (New York) core hours
Position Overview
Insomnia Labs is hiring an Engineering Technical Lead for CreatorFi, our on-chain credit platform for creators and rights-holders. This role leads a 4–8 person squad and focuses on Platform/Infrastructure and technical delivery leadership. You’ll partner closely with Product to turn business goals into resilient, secure, and scalable systems—while still coding on the most critical paths (~20%).
Reporting line: Partners day-to-day with the Head of Product; reports into the CreatorFi Engineering leadership.
Emphasis: Platform/Infra leadership with preferred experience across payment systems, data platforms, and Web3.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Direction (hands-on but leveraged)
Own target architecture, patterns, and guardrails for CreatorFi platform services (auth, data, orchestration, observability).
Write and/or review design docs; spike tricky pieces; set code-quality bars; merge complex PRs.
Proactively manage tech debt and trade-offs; keep the roadmap honest about platform risks and runway.
Delivery & Execution
Convert product asks into a cohesive Work Breakdown Structure (WBS), estimates, sequencing, and risk plan.
Run the engineering side of delivery: daily flow, unblocking, dependency management, and predictable on-time releases.
Coordinate with shared QA/DevOps; ensure CI/CD pipelines and environments are healthy and fast.

Reliability, Security & Compliance
Define and own SLIs/SLOs and error budgets; instrument dashboards and alerts.
Enforce CI/CD gates, automated testing thresholds, code-review standards, and security scanning.
Lead operational readiness and incident response; drive fixes to completion.
Auditability & SOC 2: ensure structured logging, change control, access reviews, evidence collection, and control ownership.
Key custody: design and operate secrets, KMS/HSM integration, and least-privilege patterns across services.
Own the on-call rota for the squad; maintain runbooks and escalation paths.

People & Team Health
Mentor engineers; raise the bar on PRs and design docs; pair where it matters.
Provide performance signals to engineering leadership; help with interviewing, leveling, and onboarding.

Partnering with Product
PM brings the problem, user context, and success metrics; TL owns how we build and run it.
Co-author a plan/roadmap with clear milestones, exit criteria, and risk mitigation.

Required Qualifications
6–10 years total software experience, including 3+ years as a Tech Lead over a 4–8 engineer squad.

Proven track record leading platform/infra initiatives for SaaS or fintech-like systems (availability, scale, security).
Deep AWS expertise (professional-level certification preferred) and hands-on with core services (e.g., IAM, VPC, ECS/EKS/Lambda, KMS, RDS/aurora, S3, CloudWatch).
Strong systems design skills; excellent written design docs and crisp verbal walkthroughs.
Pragmatic coder capable of owning the critical 20% (TypeScript/Node, Python, or Go preferred).
Comfortable leading in a distributed, async-friendly environment; fluent English communication.
Ability to work 9am–5pm ET core hours, regardless of location.

Preferred Qualifications
Payments or financial systems (idempotency, reconciliation, ledgers, PSP integrations).
Data platforms (eventing, Kafka/Kinesis, CDC, warehouse/Lakehouse, DBT, schema governance).
Web3 stack familiarity (Solidity/Foundry/Hardhat, custodial vs. non-custodial flows, chain interaction patterns).
Infra-as-code (Terraform), containers (Docker/Kubernetes), observability (OpenTelemetry, Datadog/Prometheus).
Security and privacy patterns (threat modeling, least privilege, client-side encryption).

Working Model
30% design & architecture (docs, reviews, spikes)
30% delivery leadership (planning, unblocking, cross-team dependencies)
20% hands-on coding of critical paths
20% reliability/security/quality (SLOs, audits, on-call, controls)