About the role

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 - Working knowledge of English for cross-team collaboration (required) 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. Pro Tip: How do we review your CV? Help us find you! We filter applications with the help of AI. To ensure your profile is properly evaluated, we recommend d