Senior Software Engineering Lead (Hands-on AI & Full Stack)

ABOUT THE ROLE

We are looking for a highly technical, hands-on Software Engineering Leader who combines deep software development expertise with proven experience leading the successful delivery of complex products, platforms, and AI-powered solutions.

This is a player-coach role, not a people-manager-only position. The ideal candidate is currently hands-on in software development, architecture, code reviews, and technical problem-solving while leading a team of 8-10 engineers.

If you have moved completely away from coding and are primarily focused on project/program management, this role will not be a fit.

What You Will Do

Technical Leadership

- Lead the design and development of scalable and maintainable applications using React, Next.js, TypeScript, Python and Flask.
- Drive technical design discussions and make pragmatic architecture decisions aligned with business and engineering goals.
- Review critical code changes and establish high engineering standards around maintainability, security, performance and scalability.
- Actively participate in development activities and contribute hands-on to complex features, technical spikes and critical components.
- Identify and address technical debt, performance bottlenecks and architectural risks.

Delivery Leadership
- Own end-to-end delivery of features and projects through a team of 8-10 software engineers.
- Break down business requirements into executable technical work.
- Plan and coordinate work across frontend and backend developers.
- Proactively manage dependencies, risks, blockers and delivery commitments.




- Drive Agile ceremonies including sprint planning, backlog refinement and retrospectives.
- Ensure predictable delivery while maintaining engineering quality.

Team Leadership
- Provide day-to-day technical leadership and mentoring for developers.
- Coach engineers through design reviews, pair programming and code reviews.
- Help build technical capability across the team.
- Participate in technical hiring and evaluation of engineering talent.

MUST HAVE EXPERIENCE

- 12-14 years of software engineering experience.
- Minimum 3+ years leading teams of 6-10 engineers.
- Strong hands-on coding experience in the last 2-3 years.
- Proven experience delivering multiple software projects through engineering teams.
- Strong expertise in React, Next.js, TypeScript, Python and Flask.

Experience designing and building REST APIs.
- Robust software architecture and system design experience.
- Experience with SQL databases, Docker, CI/CD and cloud platforms.

Strong understanding of secure coding practices and application security
- Experience with Agile delivery models.
- Minimum 2-3 years of hands-on experience working on AI and Generative AI projects.
- Experience designing, developing or integrating LLM-powered applications, AI agents, RAG solutions, prompt engineering, vector databases and AI application architecture.
- Experience leading or mentoring AI/GenAI developers while remaining technically involved.
- Ability to evaluate AI solution designs, model selection approaches, scalability, security and production readiness.

PREFERRED

- Azure or AWS cloud experience.
- DevSecOps experience.
- Enterprise-scale application development.

📌 Senior Software Engineering Lead (India)
🏢 Cherry Bekaert
📍 India