Tech Lead Manager

About the Role

We're looking for a Tech Lead Manager to lead a squad of 4–8 engineers. This is a player-coach role: you'll stay hands-on technically (40–60% IC work) while owning your team's delivery, quality, and people development.

At this level, you're the first-line manager for your squad—running 1:1s, giving feedback, coaching careers, and building a culture of ownership and psychological safety. You're also still in the code, making technical decisions and shipping alongside your team.

What You'll Do

People & Team (40–60%)

Build the team — Hire and onboard E1–E3 engineers

Develop your people — Run effective 1:1s, give direct feedback, write performance reviews, and coach career growth

Foster culture — Build psychological safety, ownership, and accountability within the squad

Shield the team — Remove blockers, handle noise, and keep the squad focused on delivery

Technical (40–60%)

Stay hands-on — Write code, review PRs, and contribute to technical decisions

Own delivery — Ensure the squad delivers on commitments with high quality and predictable velocity

Drive quality — Champion testing, observability, and engineering best practices

Handle incidents — Own squad-level incidents and postmortems

Leverage AI — Use AI tools daily for code reviews, design drafts, and debugging; teach the squad effective AI usage

Planning & Alignment

Run the squad — Lead sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives

Align with product — Partner with PMs and designers to translate requirements into deliverable work

Communicate up — Represent the squad in planning, cross-team syncs, and leadership discussions

What We're Looking For

Experience

4+ years in software engineering

1+ years managing or leading a team (formal or informal)

Technical

Strong technical background—you can guide architecture discussions and code reviews

Familiar with modern development practices: CI/CD, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), observability

Comfortable with our stack or similar: Java/Spring, Angular/React, PostgreSQL, AWS, DataDog

Still enjoys being in the code and staying technically sharp

AI Fluency

Uses AI tools (Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT) daily for code reviews, design drafts, and debugging

Teaches squad effective AI usage and best practices

Experiments with AI to accelerate team delivery and quality

Leadership & People

Experience running 1:1s and giving direct, kind feedback

Track record of developing engineers and helping them grow

Servant leadership mindset—you enable others to do their best work

Builds trust, psychological safety, and ownership culture

Communication

Clear communicator with engineers, PMs, and leadership

Sets expectations and provides continuous feedback

Fluent in Spanish; working knowledge of English for cross-team collaboration

Mindset

Comfortable balancing people and technical responsibilities

Thrives in ambiguity; makes smart trade-offs with incomplete information

Cares about both business outcomes and engineering excellence

Nice to Have

Experience in fintech, payments, or high-growth startups

Background scaling or building teams from scratch

Familiarity with engineering career frameworks and coaching practices

On-call and incident management experience

Our Stack

Java/Spring, Python, Go · Angular, React · PostgreSQL, MongoDB · AWS (ECS, Lambda) · DataDog · Pulumi · Jenkins

Why Aplazo

Our mission is to empower financial access and opportunity across Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent solutions. Our tech vision: be the most beloved and innovative tech organization in Latin America.

We're a Series B fintech growing fast—you'll build and lead a team that ships products reaching millions of customers.