Senior Group Technical Architect
Costa Rica
Job Description
Senior Group Technical Architect
San Francisco, Heredia
Job Summary
Role Title: Lead Software Engineer – Chapter Lead
Location: Costa Rica
Experience: 10+ years
Primary Skills: Python / Node.js / C# / Go, Kafka, REST APIs, AWS, Docker, Kubernetes
Role Type: Senior hands-on engineering leader with chapter-level capability ownership
Role Summary
We are looking for a Lead Software Engineer with 10+ years of experience who can operate as both a senior hands-on engineer and a Chapter Lead. The role requires strong backend/platform engineering depth, cloud-native delivery experience, and the ability to set engineering standards across squads.
The Chapter Lead will be responsible for leading technical design, mentoring engineers, governing engineering practices, supporting hiring and onboarding, and ensuring consistent delivery quality across teams. The role is expected to work closely with squad leads, product owners, architects, DevOps teams, and engineering managers.
Key Responsibilities
Engineering Leadership
Lead the design and development of scalable backend services, APIs, event-driven systems, and cloud-native applications.
Provide hands-on technical leadership across one or more backend languages such as Python, Node.js, C#, or Go.
Define engineering standards for API design, microservices, event streaming, containerization, deployment, observability, and production readiness.
Review architecture, design decisions, code quality, performance, security, resiliency, and operational readiness.
Drive adoption of modern software engineering practices including CI/CD, automated testing, secure coding, documentation, and cloud-native development.
Chapter Lead Responsibilities
Act as the capability lead for backend/software engineering resources across squads.
Establish coding standards, design patterns, reusable components, development guardrails, and engineering best practices.
Mentor engineers across proficiency levels and help them grow from individual contributors to senior engineers and technical leads.
Create and maintain the chapter skill matrix, learning roadmap, interview framework, technical assessment criteria, and onboarding plan.
Run chapter forums, design reviews, code review clinics, technical deep dives, and knowledge-sharing sessions.
Provide technical input into performance reviews, capability assessments, succession planning, and improvement plans.
Squad Enablement
Work with squad leads and product/platform teams to understand backlog, sprint priorities, technical dependencies, and delivery risks.
Help squads break down complex engineering problems into executable technical plans.
Support issue resolution for production defects, integration failures, performance bottlenecks, deployment issues, and architectural blockers.
Ensure engineers remain aligned to squad delivery while following chapter-level engineering standards.
Cloud-Native and Platform Engineering
Design and build services deployed on AWS using modern cloud patterns.
Use Docker and Kubernetes for containerized application development, deployment, scaling, and runtime management.
Design and implement event-driven patterns using Kafka, including producers, consumers, topics, partitions, retries, dead-letter queues, and message processing reliability.
Build secure and scalable REST APIs aligned to enterprise integration standards.
Collaborate with DevOps/SRE teams on CI/CD pipelines, monitoring, logging, resilience, and incident management.
Skill Requirements
Technical Skills
Strong hands-on experience in at least two of the following backend languages:
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Python
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Node.js
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C#
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Go
Strong experience with:
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REST API design and development
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Kafka / event-driven architecture
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AWS cloud services
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Docker
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Kubernetes
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Microservices architecture
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Distributed systems design
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CI/CD and DevOps ways of working
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Unit testing, integration testing, and service-level testing
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Logging, monitoring, tracing, and production troubleshooting
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Secure coding and API security
Leadership Skills
Proven experience leading senior engineers or engineering squads.
Ability to set technical direction and influence teams without relying only on formal reporting authority.
Strong mentoring, coaching, and capability-building mindset.
Experience conducting technical interviews, code reviews, design reviews, and engineering assessments.
Ability to communicate technical trade-offs clearly to architects, product teams, platform leads, and delivery leadership.
Other Requirements
Minimum Hiring Bar
The candidate should be:
- Expert in backend engineering, REST APIs, microservices, code review, mentoring, and engineering standards.
- Proficient or better in AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, CI/CD, observability, secure SDLC, and agile delivery.
- Capable of operating as a Chapter Lead, not only as a senior individual contributor.
Information at a Glance