Summary: Seeking a Tech Lead Manager to lead a software engineering squad, balancing hands-on technical contributions with team development and delivery ownership. Highlights: 1. Player-coach role balancing technical work with leadership 2. Focus on building and developing a high-performing engineering squad 3. Opportunity to leverage and teach AI tools daily **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 * Fluent in Spanish; working knowledge of English for cross\-team collaboration **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.