Hiring Tech Leads: The Complete Guide

# Tech Lead

**Location:** Denver, CO (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a Series B fintech startup transforming how businesses manage payments and financial operations. Our platform processes $2B+ in annual transactions for 8,000+ customers across North America.

We're a team of 65 people, including 22 engineers. We value technical excellence, pragmatic decision-making, and building systems that scale. Our engineering culture emphasizes code quality, thoughtful architecture, and continuous learning.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Lead a talented team working on real-world scale challenges
- Technical decisions have visible business impact
- Strong engineering culture with low bureaucracy
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity

## The Role

We're looking for a Tech Lead to provide technical leadership for our Payments Platform team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role—you'll spend 50-60% of your time writing code while guiding a team of 5-7 engineers on architecture, code quality, and best practices.

This is NOT a management position. You won't be conducting performance reviews, handling HR issues, or spending your days in 1:1s. You'll partner with an Engineering Manager who handles people management. Your focus is technical: making architecture decisions, setting coding standards, mentoring engineers on technical growth, and building features alongside your team.

The ideal candidate is a strong engineer who genuinely enjoys helping others grow technically. You're excited about influencing how systems are built, not just building them yourself.

## What This Role IS

- **Technical leadership:** You'll make architecture decisions, set coding standards, and guide technical direction for the team
- **Hands-on coding:** You'll spend 50-60% of your time writing production code—this is not a full-time leadership position
- **Mentorship-focused:** You'll help engineers grow through code reviews, pairing sessions, and technical guidance
- **Collaborative:** You'll work closely with an Engineering Manager who handles people management while you own technical leadership
- **High-impact:** Your decisions will shape how we build and scale our payments infrastructure

## What This Role is NOT

- **Not an Engineering Manager role:** You won't conduct performance reviews, handle HR issues, or spend your days in 1:1s. We have Engineering Managers for people management—you'll partner with them, not replace them.
- **Not a glorified Senior Engineer:** This is a leadership role with real responsibility. You'll influence architecture decisions across the team, not just your own features.
- **Not a "Staff Engineer with a title":** Tech Leads at [Company] have explicit ownership of technical direction and team standards. It's a leadership role, not just an IC with seniority.
- **Not a full-time architect role:** You'll make architecture decisions, but you'll also implement them. We don't have architects who don't code.

## Objectives of This Role

- Establish technical direction and coding standards for the Payments Platform team
- Improve code quality and reduce technical debt through systematic refactoring
- Mentor engineers to grow their technical skills and architectural thinking
- Lead the design and implementation of our new real-time payment processing system
- Build a culture of code review, documentation, and knowledge sharing

## Responsibilities

- Make architecture decisions for new features and system improvements
- Write production code (50-60% of time), particularly for complex or foundational work
- Conduct thorough code reviews focused on architecture, patterns, and best practices
- Mentor engineers through pairing sessions, technical guidance, and constructive feedback
- Set and maintain coding standards, patterns, and technical documentation
- Lead technical design discussions and drive consensus on implementation approaches
- Evaluate new technologies and tools, making recommendations based on team needs
- Collaborate with the Engineering Manager on team capacity, technical hiring, and project planning
- Communicate technical decisions and trade-offs to stakeholders

## Required Skills and Qualifications

- 7+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership capacity
- Strong backend development skills in Java, Kotlin, or similar languages
- Experience designing and building distributed systems at scale
- Track record of making architecture decisions and influencing technical direction
- Experience mentoring engineers—helping others grow, not just shipping your own code
- Excellent code review skills with constructive, educational feedback
- Strong communication skills for explaining technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
- Demonstrated ability to balance technical excellence with pragmatic delivery

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- Experience with payments, fintech, or financial services domains
- Familiarity with event-driven architectures and message queues (Kafka, RabbitMQ)
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP) and containerization (Kubernetes)
- Background in improving engineering culture, processes, or developer experience
- Experience working closely with Engineering Managers in a partnership model
- Open source contributions or technical blog posts demonstrating thought leadership

## Tech Stack

- **Languages:** Kotlin (primary), Java, TypeScript
- **Frameworks:** Spring Boot, Ktor
- **Databases:** PostgreSQL, Redis, DynamoDB
- **Messaging:** Kafka, SQS
- **Infrastructure:** AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform
- **Observability:** Datadog, PagerDuty
- **CI/CD:** GitHub Actions, ArgoCD
- **Collaboration:** GitHub, Linear, Notion, Slack

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $170,000 - $210,000 (based on experience)

**Equity:** 0.08% - 0.15% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees, 75% for dependents)
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- $3,000 annual learning budget (conferences, courses, certifications)
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- 16 weeks paid parental leave
- Flexible hybrid work (2-3 days in Denver office)
- Monthly team events and annual engineering offsite

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2-3 weeks. We provide feedback at every stage and respect your time.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min) - We'll discuss your background, career interests, and what you're looking for in a Tech Lead role.

- **Step 2: Hiring Manager Conversation** (45 min) - A discussion with the Engineering Director about your experience, how you approach technical leadership, and what kind of team environment you thrive in.

- **Step 3: Technical Screen** (60 min) - A coding session focused on problem-solving and code quality. This isn't a trick question interview—we want to see how you think and write code.

- **Step 4: System Design** (60 min) - Design a system relevant to our domain. We're evaluating your architectural thinking, trade-off analysis, and ability to communicate technical decisions.

- **Step 5: Leadership Discussion** (60 min) - A conversation about how you approach technical leadership: mentoring, code reviews, influencing decisions, and working with Engineering Managers. We'll discuss real scenarios you've handled.

- **Step 6: Team Meet** (45 min) - Meet potential teammates, ask questions, and get a feel for how we work together.

We aim to make offers within 48 hours of final interviews.

## How to Apply

Submit your resume and optionally include links to your GitHub, technical blog, or anything that demonstrates your engineering and leadership approach. We review every application and respond within 5 business days.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer. We value diversity and are committed to creating an inclusive environment for all employees. We encourage applications from candidates who may not meet every qualification—research shows underrepresented groups tend to apply only when they meet 100% of requirements.*