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.