What You'll Do
We're looking for a Platform Team Leader to own the foundational systems that power Harmonya's R&D organization. The Platform team is a horizontal, internal-facing team — its customers are the engineers, data scientists, and analysts on our application teams, and its mission is to make them faster, safer, and more productive.
You will lead a team responsible for our production-critical data ingestion (scraping system, data normalization platform), our developer experience surface (Python mono repo, packages and services framework, CI/CD, shared images), our Airflow base layer, and our backoffice. These systems sit on the critical path for production — every other team depends on them, and uptime, incident response, and reliability are core to the role.
This role is for a hands-on technical leader who enjoys both shipping code and growing engineers. You'll spend roughly 50% of your time hands-on writing code, reviewing designs, and the rest leading the team, partnering with peer team leads, and shaping the technical direction of our platform with the VP R&D and CTO.
Responsibilities
Lead and grow a team of strong backend engineers, owning hiring, mentorship, performance, and personal growth
Own the team's roadmap end-to-end: scoping, prioritization, delivery, and quality
Drive the architecture and evolution of the platform layers your team owns — both the data plumbing that feeds Harmonya and the developer-experience surface other R&D teams build on
Contribute hands-on (~50%) to design, code, code reviews, and production debugging
Set and uphold engineering standards across the team — code quality, system design, testing, observability, and operational excellence
Partner closely with peer team leads and the VP R&D to align on shared infrastructure, ownership boundaries, and developer experience
Lead by example on production incidents and customer-impacting issues
Influence broader R&D direction as a member of the R&D leadership forum
Requirements
3+ years of experience as a team leader in a product-oriented R&D organization
6+ years of hands-on Python development experience
Strong background designing and operating distributed systems and microservices in production
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments
Solid working knowledge of GCP (or equivalent cloud) — Cloud Run, BigQuery, GCS, IAM
Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines in a microservices / mono repo environment
Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks
Proven ability to balance hands-on contribution with team leadership at ~50/50
Strong sense of ownership, end-to-end accountability, and a builder's mindset
Excellent collaborator — comfortable working across teams and aligning on shared infrastructure ownership
Advantages
Experience leading a platform / infrastructure / DevX team specifically (vs. a feature team)
Working knowledge of Helm charts and Terraform / Terragrunt as a consumer (you don't need to own them, but you should be able to read and reason about them)
Experience with web scraping systems at scale
Experience with Python packaging, mono repo tooling, and shared library design
Comfortable using GenAI tools (Cursor, Claude, etc.) as part of your engineering workflow
B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent
Back to Careers
3+ years of experience as a team leader in a product-oriented R&D organization
6+ years of hands-on Python development experience
Strong background designing and operating distributed systems and microservices in production
Hands-on experience with Kubernetes and Docker in production environments
Solid working knowledge of GCP (or equivalent cloud) — Cloud Run, BigQuery, GCS, IAM
Experience designing and operating CI/CD pipelines in a microservices / mono repo environment
Experience with Airflow or similar orchestration frameworks
Proven ability to balance hands-on contribution with team leadership at ~50/50
Strong sense of ownership, end-to-end accountability, and a builder's mindset
Excellent collaborator — comfortable working across teams and aligning on shared infrastructure ownership
Advantages
Experience leading a platform / infrastructure / DevX team specifically (vs. a feature team)
Working knowledge of Helm charts and Terraform / Terragrunt as a consumer (you don't need to own them, but you should be able to read and reason about them)
Experience with web scraping systems at scale
Experience with Python packaging, mono repo tooling, and shared library design
Comfortable using GenAI tools (Cursor, Claude, etc.) as part of your engineering workflow
B.Sc. in Computer Science or equivalent
