Full Stack Team Lead
Summary
Lead a small full-stack engineering team at Second Nature, owning Python backend architecture, APIs, and infrastructure for a real-time, AI-powered browser conversation platform (audio, WebSockets), while mentoring engineers, guiding React work, and shaping team culture and reliability practices.
About the Role
At Second Nature AI, we're building a cutting-edge, AI-powered conversation platform that lives in the browser, real-time audio, WebSockets, and everything that comes with it. We're looking for a Full Stack Team Lead, backend-oriented, someone who can go deep on Python and distributed systems, stay comfortable enough in React to guide a team that owns both ends of the stack, and help shape how a small, fast-moving engineering team works and grows.
Key Responsibilities
- Own backend architecture, APIs, and infrastructure end to end, with hands-on involvement in frontend work where needed.
- Lead and grow a small team of engineers across different experience levels, from technical mentoring to career development.
- Set the tone for incident response, on-call availability, and production reliability.
- Adapt the team's direction as the company grows, and take the lead in shaping how the team works rather than just reacting to change.
- Build a culture of open feedback, where the team's input genuinely shapes the roadmap.
- Represent the team's needs to company leadership, including on how and where people work.
- Participate in code reviews and design discussions, and mentor team members directly.
Requirements
- 8+ years of hands-on development experience, with deep expertise in Python and backend architecture.
- Strong working knowledge of React and modern frontend practices, comfortable owning full stack features when needed.
- Experience with distributed, async systems.
- Real startup experience, ideally more than one company, including exposure to production incidents.
- A track record of developing engineers at different levels, not just excelling as an individual contributor.
- A people-first leadership style. Explicitly not a fit: someone purely focused on output who doesn't see the people behind the work.
Bonus Points
- Django and/or FastAPI experience.
- Production observability and performance debugging: Datadog, tracing, root-causing issues across the stack.
- Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), Docker, or Kubernetes.
- Comfortable making hybrid and remote calls case by case.