Who We're Looking For

We're looking for a Hands-on Tech Lead for an early-stage travel and loyalty product. Your primary responsibility is to guide the frontend, backend, and AI/ML team through architecture decisions, infrastructure choices, API integrations, and product delivery.

You will turn product priorities into clear technical work, mentor engineers, review implementation, and help the team resolve blockers. The role centers on technical leadership and solution design, with enough engineering depth to assess code and support difficult implementation decisions. Day-to-day feature development is handled by the existing engineering teams.

You will work directly with the founders, existing CTO, and Chief Product Officer, aligning product priorities with technical decisions and coordinating discussions with external API and service providers. 8+ years of production software engineering experience and English at C1 or higher are required, with strong written communication and confidence in discussions with founders and partners.

About the Company

CleverLabs is a software development company specializing in building WEB and API applications since 2015. We work on long-term projects, developing products from scratch as part of distributed product teams. Our clients are based in the USA, the UK, EU, and MENA regions.

About the Project

The web application helps travelers get more value from loyalty programs, credit card rewards, and memberships. It brings balances, status, expiration dates, and perks into one view and recommends when to use cash or points, transfer rewards, or use travel benefits. The existing MVP connects loyalty accounts, brings together membership and employer benefits, and supports flight and hotel searches through an AI chat. The roadmap expands into other travel categories and broader consumer benefits, with additional integrations and features such as award-fare monitoring and alerts. The product combines data aggregation and deterministic business logic with a Claude-based AI layer; financial calculations must remain reliable and separate from model-generated reasoning.

Engagement model: Full-time team augmentation through CleverLabs, providing hands-on leadership to the client's existing frontend, backend, and AI/ML engineers and interns.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor the frontend, backend, and AI/ML team, guiding architecture, infrastructure, integrations, and delivery quality. Translate product priorities into scoped tasks, define acceptance criteria, assign ownership, and coordinate dependencies.
• Drive work from planning through implementation, testing, and release; remove blockers and communicate progress, risks, and tradeoffs to the founders and CTO.
• Assess the existing MVP and agree with the CTO on what to retain, refactor, or rebuild, balancing product delivery with reliability and maintainability.
• Work with engineers to resolve technical blockers, assess implementation approaches, and design reliable integration and data flows. Contribute code or prototypes where they help validate a solution.
• Review code and architecture across the stack. Verify that frontend, backend, and AI/ML components work together and meet the agreed quality bar.
• Validate AI-generated code and AI-powered features through review, testing, and evaluation; keep deterministic calculations and business rules reliable.
• Research third-party services, compare integration options, and recommend suitable providers. Lead technical discussions with external companies to clarify API capabilities, requirements, constraints, and the path to integration.
• Establish practical code review, testing, CI/CD, release, monitoring, and incident-handling practices appropriate for a small team.
• Coach engineers and interns, give actionable feedback, and help the team improve technical judgment and delivery ownership.
• Protect sensitive user data, enforce appropriate access controls, and support partner security reviews and the path toward SOC 2.

Required Skills & Experience

• 8+ years building and operating production software, including demonstrated responsibility for leading engineers and delivering a product or a substantial product area.
• Experience as a Tech Lead, Engineering Lead, or Engineering Manager, combining a strong software engineering background with team leadership, architecture decisions, and delivery ownership.
• Experience coordinating work across frontend and backend, making architecture decisions, reviewing code, and resolving integration and release issues.
• Strong Python engineering experience and the ability to review backend code, guide API design, and make architecture decisions across a full-stack system.
• Evidence of taking an early product to real users or bringing a fast-built MVP to a reliable production standard.
• Ability to break ambiguous goals into implementable tasks, set priorities with stakeholders, manage dependencies, and maintain a clear view of delivery risks.
• Production API integration experience, including validation, retries, idempotency, failure handling, and data consistency.
• Practical understanding of LLM integrations, tool calling, structured outputs, and evaluation, and the judgment to distinguish model reasoning from deterministic business logic.
• Experience mentoring engineers and setting effective testing, code review, and release practices.
• Sound security judgment when working with sensitive personal or financial data.
• English at C1 or higher, clear communication with engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and experience leading technical discussions with external service providers.

Technical Focus

• Backend and AI: Python. The specific backend frameworks and deployment setup will be discussed with the CTO.
• Frontend: React and Vue, with REST APIs connecting frontend and backend.
• Data and infrastructure: data ingestion, storage design, and integration reliability. The database and infrastructure details will be clarified during technical discussions.
• Integrations: third-party APIs, OAuth, provider adapters, and reliable end-to-end workflows.
• Applied AI: Claude powers the in-product AI layer and is also used for development. Relevant skills include LLM integrations, tool calling, evaluation, and review of AI-assisted implementation.

Nice to Have

• Experience leading a small startup engineering team across frontend, backend, and AI/ML.
• Travel, loyalty, employee benefits, payments, or account aggregation experience. Familiarity with providers such as MX, Stripe, or Method is useful; these are being considered for future integrations.
• SOC 2 preparation, enterprise security reviews, or technical due diligence during fundraising.
• Optimization, graph search, constraint solving, or rules engines.
• Experience leading distributed teams, including contractors and interns.

Working Conditions

• Full-time, remote engagement with availability from 08:00 to at least 13:00 US Eastern time. Some meetings may require overlap until 14:00-15:00 Eastern; the regular schedule will be agreed before the engagement.
• Close collaboration with the founders, CTO, Chief Product Officer, and engineering teams, including calls with external integration partners during US business hours.
• The role focuses on technical guidance, mentoring, architecture, and integration planning. The expected level of direct coding and any out-of-hours support arrangements will be agreed before the engagement starts.
• Start date, compensation, and initial engagement duration are to be agreed; the client is interested in continuity and a longer-term collaboration.

Benefits

• Remote work options.
• MacBook Pro work equipment.
• Individual English lessons.
• Coverage of sports and wellness expenses.
• Social health benefits.
• Gifts for holidays and special events.
• Professional training, conference participation, internal meetups, and seminars.