[Hiring] Technical Lead @FourKites

Role Description

At FourKites we have the opportunity to tackle complex challenges with real-world impacts. Whether it’s medical supplies from Cardinal Health or groceries for Walmart, the FourKites platform helps customers operate global supply chains that are efficient, agile and sustainable.

Join a team of curious problem solvers that celebrates differences, leads with empathy and values inclusivity.

We are hiring Technical Lead for the most data-intensive parts of our platform: Ocean Visibility and/or Order Inventory Visibility (OV/IV). Select which domain you are drawn to, or let us help you pick.

As a Technical Lead you are the engineering owner of your team’s delivery. You are accountable for what ships, when it ships and how well it is built. You set the technical direction, you hold the bar on engineering practices, and you stay hands-on in the code — typically 40–60% of your week. This is explicitly not a people management role. You will not own headcount, performance reviews, compensation or career ladders — your Engineering Manager does. You own the technical and delivery outcome of the team, and the Engineering Manager owns the people.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building and operating production software, including 2+ years as a tech lead, staff engineer or equivalent leading a team’s technical delivery.
• Deep backend expertise in Java (Spring Boot) and/or Go, with strong fundamentals in distributed systems and object-oriented design.
• Hands-on experience designing microservices and event-driven systems — Kafka or similar — including idempotency, ordering, replay and failure handling.
• Strong data modelling and SQL skills on PostgreSQL (or equivalent), plus practical experience with caching (Redis) and query/performance tuning at scale.
• Production experience on AWS with containerised deployments, CI/CD and modern observability tooling.
• A track record of shipping complex, multi-quarter work on time — and of being the person who found the risk early.
• Demonstrated ability to lift a team’s engineering practices, not just your own output, through standards, review and mentorship.
• Excellent written and verbal communication — you can write a design doc an executive and a junior engineer both understand.
• Comfortable with influence rather than authority: you get the team to a better answer without owning anyone’s performance review.
• Fluent in Agile delivery and the tooling around it (Jira, Confluence, Git branching and rebasing).
• Comfortable working with a distributed US–India team and with customers directly.

Requirements

• Own the end-to-end technical delivery of your team’s roadmap — from breaking down an epic into sequenced, atomic units of work through to production release.
• Partner with the Product Manager and Engineering Manager to shape scope, sequence work realistically and say no to the things that will not fit.
• Run sprint-level execution: identify risk early, surface and clear blockers, and keep commitments honest and predictable.
• Be the single technical point of accountability when a release slips, a migration goes sideways or a customer escalation lands on the team.
• Drive production health for your services — SLOs, on-call quality, alert hygiene, and root-cause follow-through rather than repeat firefighting.
• Own the architecture of your domain: service boundaries, data models, event contracts and integration patterns, aligned with the FourKites North Star architecture.
• Write and review design documents; make the calls that need making and document the trade-offs behind them.
• Evaluate frameworks, tools and third-party/partner APIs; decide what we build, what we buy and what we integrate.
• Maintain a live view of technical debt in your domain and negotiate a steady share of roadmap capacity to pay it down.
• Design for the scale we actually run at — millions of supply chain events a day, across 80+ countries and 1,600+ global brands.
• Define and enforce the team’s engineering standards: coding conventions, test strategy and coverage expectations, PR size and review turnaround, branching, observability and documentation.
• Review code with intent — catch design problems, not just style — and keep review latency low so the team stays unblocked.
• Make quality measurable. Watch and improve the signals that matter: change failure rate, revert and hotfix rate, escaped defects, MTTR, cycle time from first commit to production.
• Raise the floor, not just the ceiling: make sure best practices hold across every engineer on the team, including the newest one.
• Champion secure-by-default and well-instrumented software — tests, tracing, metrics and alerts are part of done, not a follow-up ticket.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, pairing and code review — technical growth, with career growth left to the Engineering Manager.
• Give the EM and PM a clear, unvarnished read on the team’s technical capability and delivery risk.
• Onboard new engineers into the domain quickly, and keep the domain knowledge written down rather than resident in one head.
• Participate in hiring as a technical interviewer and calibrate the bar for your domain.
• Translate between engineering and the rest of the business — Product, Implementation, Customer Engineering, Support and, when needed, the customer.
• Coordinate with tech leads in adjacent domains (OTR, Appointment Manager, Platform, AI Agents) on shared contracts and cross-team dependencies.
• Represent your domain in architecture reviews and platform-level decisions.

Benefits

• Medical benefits start on first day of employment.
• 36 PTO days (Sick, Casual and Earned), 5 recharge days, 2 volunteer days.
• Home Office setups and Technology reimbursement.
• Lifestyle & Family benefits.
• Annual Swags/ Festive Swags.
• Ongoing learning & development opportunities (Professional development program, Toast Master club etc.).