R&D Lead

You will spearhead technology discovery, applied research, and technical innovation across backend, APIs, web, mobile, cloud, and emerging platforms. You will identify, validate, and de-risk new technologies and enable their transition into product engineering teams. While you won't own day-to-day product engineering or feature delivery, you will work closely with Product Engineering to influence future platforms and architectures. You'll lead cross-functional research initiatives, drive proof-of-concept and spike solutions, and act as a technical thought leader shaping long-term architecture and build-vs-buy decisions, all while ensuring research outcomes meet security, quality, and compliance standards.

Responsibilities

• Lead technology research and discovery initiatives across backend systems, APIs, web, mobile, cloud, and emerging domains
• Identify, evaluate, and prototype emerging technologies, tools, frameworks, and architectural patterns relevant to the strategic roadmap
• Drive proof-of-concept (PoC), spike solutions, and experimental platforms to validate feasibility, scalability, security, and performance
• Establish a structured research to validation to handoff model to transition successful innovations to Product Engineering teams
• Act as a technical thought leader, influencing long-term architecture, platform evolution, and build-vs-buy decisions
• Partner with Product Management, Product Engineering, Security, and QA teams to ensure research outcomes align with business and compliance needs
• Ensure research outcomes adhere to security, quality, regulatory, and compliance standards from inception
• Track industry trends, academic research, open-source ecosystems, and startup innovations to maintain a competitive technology edge
• Define success metrics for R&D initiatives and regularly communicate outcomes to executive stakeholders

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience in R&D, applied research, platform engineering, or innovation leadership
• Proven experience leading cross-functional technical research teams and exploratory initiatives
• Strong background in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, and modern application stacks
• Demonstrated ability to translate research and experimentation into production-adoptable solutions
• Excellent leadership, communication, and stakeholder management skills
• Experience managing multiple concurrent research tracks with varying levels of maturity
• Deep understanding of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies (AWS, Azure, GCP)
• Ability to review, guide, and influence production-level code without being the primary implementer
• Strong architectural judgment with a security-first mindset
• Experience establishing R&D best practices, including experimentation frameworks and technical evaluation criteria
• Familiarity with DevSecOps principles, CI/CD pipelines, and secure software supply chains
• Hands-on expertise in one or more of: Java, Node.js, Go (Golang), C / C++, JavaScript / TypeScript
• Experience with containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes
• Exposure to identity, security, cryptography, or authentication technologies