Lead Software Engineer (Team Lead)

Job description

Design Your Future With Us. Creativity lives here. We celebrate craftsmanship, design, and inspired living. Whether you are in marketing, tech, or logistics, your voice and vision matter. We showcase employee spaces, share design stories, and promote growth through a culture of flexibility, storytelling, and opportunity. From onboarding to day-to-day, we help you bring your style to life. **Reports to:** Chief Growth Officer **Location:** San Jose, Costa Rica (Hybrid) ### About the Role Our retail platform is scaling across multiple brands and needs a senior engineer who can own a service area end-to-end — setting technical direction, writing production code daily, and raising the bar for the developers around you. As **Software Engineer (Team Lead)**, you will serve as the technical owner for a core area of our retail service cloud, designing approaches, contributing code, and mentoring engineers while driving the roadmap from legacy replacement through new feature delivery. In your first 6–12 months, success means you have shipped meaningful improvements to the platform, replaced targeted legacy services, and established clear technical standards that the team follows without prompting. This is a lean team. You will own a lot, move fast, and make decisions with full end-to-end responsibility. ### What You'll Do - Serve as technical owner for your area or service within the retail service cloud, setting architecture direction and maintaining quality standards - Design, build, and ship features — reading and writing code daily alongside the team - Identify and resolve technical challenges across the stack, from profiling and refactoring to scaling the platform - Replace legacy code and services with modern, maintainable solutions and optimize the overall stack - Build frameworks and reusable patterns for upcoming projects across the portfolio - Plan and communicate product roadmaps, triage sprint tickets, and push back on requests when technical tradeoffs demand it - Mentor junior engineers through code review, pairing, and hands-on problem solving - Help build the team by driving developer productivity and contributing to hiring decisions ### Required Qualifications - Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript/JavaScript, React, and Node.js - Proficiency / production experience with API Gateway, AWS Lambda, S3, DynamoDB. - Comfortable with IAM and CloudWatch for debugging + least-privilege design - Experience with Python and Django or comparable server-side frameworks - Track record of owning a product or service area technically — architecture decisions, code quality, and delivery outcomes - Demonstrated ability to mentor and elevate other engineers while remaining a significant individual contributor - Experience replacing or modernizing legacy systems in a production environment - Comfort triaging competing priorities, planning sprints, and communicating technical details to non-technical stakeholders - Strong opinions on code quality and engineering best practices, held loosely enough to find the best solution collaboratively ### Preferred Qualifications - Experience with retail, e-commerce, or multi-brand platform environments - Familiarity with cloud-native architectures and microservices patterns - Prior experience in a technical lead role on a small, high-output team ### Why Join The people who do best here are builders. They take ownership, move fast, and want to see the direct impact of their work. - **Cross-Functional Impact:** Your technical decisions will shape services that power multiple brands across the portfolio — the scope of your work is visible and immediate. - **Skill Building:** Work alongside senior engineers who will challenge your thinking, with daily exposure to modern frameworks, platform-scale problems, and AI-augmented tooling. - **End-to-End Ownership:** Own your service area from architecture through delivery — no waiting for approvals or handing off to another team. - **Competitive Benefits:** Paid time off policies, 401(k) match, medical/dental/vision and a variety of supplemental policies, and employee discounts across our portfolio of brands. ### Interview Process 1. **Recruiter Screen** - A 30-minute conversation with our recruiting team to align on the role, your background, and what you are looking for. 2. **Hiring Manager Interview** - A deeper conversation focused on your technical leadership experience, how you approach ownership of a service area, and team dynamics. 3. **Technical / Coding Challenge** - A hands-on coding exercise to assess your problem-solving approach, code quality, and comfort working in the stack. 4. **Possible In-Person Interview** - Details and logistics will be arranged with your recruiter. 5. **Reference Checks** - Conducted in parallel with the final stages where possible. 6. **Offer** - We move quickly for the right candidate. *Interview process is subject to change. Any updates will be communicated promptly and clearly.*