We are hiring Pod Team Leaders for Vanguard each one the technical owner and lead programmer of a Pod. This is a hands-on coding role, not a pure management role. You will continue shipping code on the product's critical path, lead major problem-solving and performance optimization, and at the same time guide a small team (3+ engineers) through iteration delivery.
Key Responsibilities
- Operate as the Pod's lead programmer: continuously ship code on the product's critical path, drive resolution of major issues, and own performance optimization. Hands-on coding is non-negotiable this role cannot be reduced to pure coordination.
- Decompose Epics / Stories into team-actionable tickets and assign work appropriately.
- Review the team's designs and code; safeguard the quality bar of every merge to mainline.
- Design technical solutions for the modules the Pod owns EF Core data models, messaging flows, etc.
- Provide timely feedback to the team and challenge the status quo; lead the team's collective growth.
- Engage with the Engineering Manager and Architects to debate and decide technical trade-offs.
- Report progress and risk to the PO / Scrum Master.
Required Qualifications
Technical
- 6+ years of backend development experience, including 3+ years of .NET / C#.Python.
- Independently delivered at least one production-grade microservice system; sound understanding of service decomposition and inter-service communication (synchronous HTTP vs. asynchronous messaging).
- Deep proficiency in EF Core: able to judge when to use Data Annotations vs. Fluent API; thorough understanding of N+1, change tracking, and projection performance implications.
- Solid PostgreSQL fundamentals: indexing, query plan analysis, locking, and transaction isolation levels.
- Hands-on production experience with at least one message queue technology (SQS / Kafka / RabbitMQ).
- Working knowledge of containerization and Kubernetes fundamentals (able to read Deployment / Service / ConfigMap manifests).
- High standards on design and code quality; disciplined Git workflow and rigorous commit hygiene.
- Substantial AI-coding experience practical fluency with mainstream AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor.