Technical Lead

FOUND
Santa Monica, CA

About the Company

A fast-growing aviation technology company is building software and operational infrastructure to modernize ground operations across airports and air transportation environments. Their platform helps coordinate, optimize, and streamline mission-critical workflows tied to aircraft turnaround and field operations.


The company’s long-term vision is to enable increasingly autonomous operational environments by connecting people, systems, equipment, and real-time operational data into a unified platform.


The team combines deep operational expertise with engineering talent from leading high-growth technology companies and is expanding rapidly as they scale their next-generation mobility infrastructure platform.


About the Role

The company is seeking a highly technical Engineering Lead / Tech Lead to drive development of a mission-critical operational platform used in live field environments.


This is a highly cross-functional leadership role where you will work directly with operational stakeholders and end users while leading the design, architecture, and delivery of distributed systems powering real-world operational decision-making.


You will oversee engineering execution across backend systems, APIs, internal tooling, data infrastructure, and user-facing applications while managing and mentoring a growing engineering team.


This role is ideal for someone who enjoys operating close to both the product and the customer, thrives in fast-moving environments, and wants to build software that directly impacts real-world operations.


Responsibilities

Engineering Leadership & Execution

  • Lead engineering initiatives from planning through deployment
  • Drive strong execution, delivery velocity, and engineering quality
  • Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, technical guidance, and code reviews
  • Help establish engineering best practices, processes, and technical standards
  • Own prioritization and delivery against company objectives

Technical Architecture & Ownership

  • Own architecture and technical direction across core platform systems
  • Design scalable, resilient distributed systems operating in real-world environments
  • Lead backend, frontend, API, and infrastructure decisions
  • Ensure system reliability, scalability, and operational performance

Full-Stack System Development

  • Guide development of backend services, APIs, operational tooling, and user-facing applications
  • Work with real-time operational data and high-availability systems
  • Contribute hands-on to complex technical initiatives when needed
  • Improve performance, usability, and maintainability across the platform

Product & Operational Collaboration

  • Work directly with operational users and stakeholders to understand workflows and edge cases
  • Translate operational complexity into scalable technical solutions
  • Collaborate cross-functionally with product, engineering, and external vendors
  • Ensure systems perform reliably in dynamic, real-world operating environments

Reliability & Observability

  • Build highly reliable systems with strong monitoring and observability practices
  • Improve system resiliency under real-world constraints including latency, hardware variability, and intermittent connectivity
  • Own performance, uptime, and operational stability

Requirements

  • 5+ years of software engineering experience with strong full-stack exposure
  • Experience leading projects, mentoring engineers, or acting as a Tech Lead / Engineering Manager
  • Proven ability to own systems end-to-end from architecture through production scale
  • Experience building distributed systems and operationally critical software
  • Strong experience with SQL and/or NoSQL databases
  • Strong backend development experience (Go, Java, or similar languages)
  • Familiarity with modern frontend frameworks (React, Angular, or similar)
  • Experience designing and integrating APIs (REST and/or gRPC)

Ideal Background

  • Strong ownership mentality and accountability
  • Comfortable operating in ambiguity and fast-moving startup environments
  • Interested in solving operational and infrastructure-heavy problems
  • Enjoys working closely with users and field teams
  • Excited by mobility, logistics, operational infrastructure, aviation, autonomy, or IoT systems

Nice to Have

  • Experience with real-time or event-driven systems
  • Background in mobility, logistics, aviation, IoT, or connected systems
  • Startup experience
  • Experience with telemetry, GPS, sensor data, or operational analytics systems

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