Technical Lead

Koalafi•Richmond, VA

About The Position

At Koalafi, we believe in a world where no one has to put an important purchase on hold. That’s why we’re making it easier for more people to pay for big purchases over time. Retailers across the country rely on us to offer flexible lease-to-own financing to their non-prime consumers, while increasing sales and strengthening customer loyalty. Their 2M+ customers love us because we provide a flexible way for them to make payments and give them an opportunity to improve their credit. Our 200+ Koalafi teammates enjoy inspiring and challenging work that accelerates their careers. Interested in learning more about how we’re transforming the financing experience and joining our team? What You'll Do Are you ready to build the foundation that powers the future of fintech? We're seeking a talented Platform Engineering Leader to join Koalafi and lead our newly formed Shared Tech team. You'll be at the forefront of enabling our engineering organization by building the core platforms and services that unlock business-critical capabilities across industry-leading point of sale financing products and services. In this role, you'll architect and deliver shared platforms like event streaming, communications, and tokenization services that enable real-time features and seamless customer experiences. As the Tech Lead you'll balance hands-on development with technical leadership, mentoring engineers while driving the technical vision for our platform infrastructure. You'll work in a modern tech stack using Golang backends, React/TypeScript frontends, and cloud-native architectures. We're looking for someone who embraces AI-assisted development to accelerate delivery and innovation. If you're passionate about building scalable platforms that enable autonomous teams and thrive in a fast-paced fintech environment, this is the perfect opportunity for you!

Requirements

5+ years of professional experience in systems development with strong platform or infrastructure focus.
Proficiency in Golang: Extensive experience developing backend services, APIs, and platform components using Golang.
Leadership Experience: Previous experience in a technical lead or senior developer role, mentoring teams, and leading architecture decisions in a platform or infrastructure context.
Cloud Experience: Strong familiarity with AWS services and cloud-native architectures, with experience in containerization technologies like Docker and Kubernetes.
Platform Engineering Mindset: Experience building shared services, developer tools, or platform capabilities that enable other engineering teams.
Strong Testing Practices: Extensive experience in automated testing, including unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for platform services.
CI/CD & Automation: Experience with CI/CD pipelines, automated testing frameworks, deployment tools, and infrastructure automation.
AI Development Enthusiasm: Interest in leveraging AI tools and techniques to enhance development productivity and platform capabilities.
Event-Driven Architecture: Experience with event streaming platforms, message queues, or pub/sub systems for building scalable, decoupled systems.
Security & Compliance: Understanding of security best practices for platform services, especially in fintech or regulated environments.
Excellent Communication: Strong written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders across multiple teams.
Problem-Solving Skills: Ability to troubleshoot complex distributed systems issues and design resilient platform architectures.

Nice To Haves

Experience with React/TypeScript for building developer-facing tools and interfaces.
Background in fintech, payments, or regulated industries.
Experience building/scaling shared technology platforms, infrastructure services, or developer enablement tools that support multiple product teams and business domains.
Experience with observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger, OpenTelemetry, etc.) for distributed systems.
Knowledge of tokenization, secure communications, or financial data handling.
Previous experience enabling engineering organizations through platform engineering or developer productivity initiatives.

Responsibilities

Architect Platform Services: Design, develop, and maintain core platform capabilities including event streaming, communications systems, and tokenization services using Golang and modern cloud technologies.
Lead Engineering Team: Serve as the technical leader for a small, high-impact team, mentoring engineers, conducting code reviews, and ensuring adherence to best practices and architectural standards.
Technical Vision & Strategy: Collaborate with the Architecture and other Engineering Leads to define and execute the shared tech roadmap, ensuring platforms enable business initiatives and developer velocity.
Enable Cross-Team Success: Build reusable services and libraries that unblock dependencies across product teams and enable autonomous feature development.
Maintain Platform Quality: Ensure shared services are reliable, well-documented, tested, and follow best practices for scalability, security, and maintainability.
Optimize for Developer Experience: Create platforms and tooling that maximize developer productivity and reduce coordination overhead across engineering teams.
Implement Observability: Design and implement robust monitoring, alerting, and observability frameworks for platform services to ensure high availability and performance.
Cloud Leadership: Oversee deployment and operation of platform services in AWS environments, utilizing containerization and infrastructure-as-code practices.
AI-Assisted Development: Leverage AI tools and practices to accelerate development cycles, improve code quality, and drive innovation in platform engineering.
Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with other product teams and leadership to ensure platform services align with business needs and technical strategy.
Incident Management: Lead troubleshooting efforts for platform services, ensuring rapid resolution and implementing preventative measures.