Engineering Technical Lead

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)