Technical Lead

Responsibilities:
Technical Leadership:

• Translate product requirements into detailed technical tasks and implementation plans.
• Lead architectural discussions, systems design, and technical decision-making.
• Conduct thorough code reviews and ensure engineering standards are consistently applied.
• Be hands-on in backend development on critical modules or complex features.

Delivery & Process Management:

• Own sprint planning, grooming, estimation, and retrospectives.
• Maintain clear scopes, realistic timelines, and structured execution.
• Identify risks early and help unblock engineering challenges.
• Ensure features meet acceptance criteria before reaching QA.

Team Leadership:

• Mentor and guide backend, frontend, and cross-functional engineers.
• Strengthen collaboration and communication within the engineering team.
• Foster a culture of accountability, high performance, and shared ownership.
• Support developers with clarity, planning, and technical direction.

Cross-Functional Collaboration:

• Work closely with the product owner to refine scope and technical requirements.
• Partner with QA to align testing expectations and improve overall quality.

Requirements:
Technical Expertise (Must-Have):

• Strong Laravel (v10–12) experience: deep understanding of controllers, models, migrations, queues, jobs, events, policies, and API resource structure.
• RESTful API architecture expertise, especially for multi-client systems (mobile app + admin panel).
• Advanced Eloquent modeling: relationships, eager loading, query optimization, and transaction handling.
• Strong database skills: schema design, indexing, foreign keys, performance tuning, and data integrity.
• Experience with authentication flows, specifically phone number + OTP logic and token lifecycle management.
• Experience integrating third-party services, such as SMS providers, Veriff KYC, and notification systems.
• Solid understanding of secure file handling, especially for user-generated content and sensitive ID/selfie images.
• Experience with cron jobs and queue workers, including building and debugging nightly recalculation jobs.
• Ability to lead backend architecture decisions, code reviews, and enforce clean, maintainable standards.
• Experience building or integrating role & permission systems for admin vs user access.
• Strong debugging skills: able to trace issues across multiple layers (request → controller → model → DB).
• Familiarity with deployment environments (Ubuntu + Plesk) and ability to guide DevOps-lite workflows.
• Ability to translate product requirements into technical tasks and ensure consistent implementation across backend, frontend, and mobile.
• Excellent communication skills; able to explain complex backend flows to frontend/mobile/QA teams.
• Prior leadership experience, such as mentoring devs, guiding architecture, and running code reviews.

Product & Domain Knowledge (Must-Have for Rejoyly):

• Understanding of marketplace-style applications (buyers, sellers, and user onboarding).
• Ability to maintain and extend the Reputation Engine (Internal Trust Score + Joy Meter).
• Ability to manage logic for parent profiles and child profiles
• Location mapping (user_id as parent_id)
• Product posting pipeline
• Moderation and flagging flows
• Understanding of secure verification and compliance needs for apps that involve families and minors.

Team Leadership Requirements (Must-Have):

• Able to act as the central technical decision-maker for backend, frontend, and mobile alignment.
• Able to produce architecture diagrams, API contracts, and workflow documentation.
• Can estimate tasks, break down epics, and guide sprint planning.
• Can coordinate with the product owner and support demo preparation.
• Ensures code consistency and standards across the entire engineering team.

Bonus Skills (Nice to Have):
Technical Bonuses:

• Experience with React (admin dashboards) or React Native/Expo Router (mobile apps).
• Experience with marketplace moderation tools or community safety systems.
• Familiarity with geolocation and distance-based queries.
• Familiarity with logistics, pickup/delivery flows, and scheduling systems.
• Experience with fraud detection patterns (device fingerprinting, anomaly scoring).
• Basic server admin familiarity: Nginx, SSL, and queue monitoring.

Leadership Bonuses:

• Experience scaling early-stage startups or MVP→production transitions.
• Experience training junior developers or running onboarding programs.
• Ability to propose long-term architectural plans (modularization, microservices later, etc).

Cultural Bonuses:

• Bias for high-trust, safety-first design.
• Strong documentation habits.
• Comfortable in fast-paced, iterative environments.

Core KPIs for Success:
These KPIs will be used to evaluate performance in the role:

• Sprint Delivery Accuracy: ≥ 99% of committed sprint tasks completed with QA pass.
  
• Engineering Quality (Defect Rate): ≤ 5% of features returned from QA due to avoidable issues.
• Task Breakdown & Requirement Readiness: 100% of sprint tasks must include a clear technical breakdown, accurate estimates, and acceptance criteria before the sprint starts.
• Sprint Predictability: Committed vs. delivered story points variance ≤ 10%.
• Developer Unblock Time Average blocker resolution time ≤ 4 hours during active sprint cycles

Work Schedule & Hours (Non-Negotiable): 

This role operates within a billable-hour system; therefore, working hours are fixed and must be fully maintained.

• Hours: 9:00 AM – 6:00 PM
• Break: 1-hour break included
• Total Daily Hours: 8 hours
• Weekly Hours: 40 hours
• Monthly Hours: 160 hours

Consistent availability during these hours is mandatory for team collaboration, client alignment, and delivery tracking

Job Type: Contract

Contract length: 12 months