Technical Lead Manager

**Role’s Mission**

At Aplazo, our mission is to empower financial access, opportunity, and freedom by connecting people and businesses in Latin America through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions.

We are currently seeking a **Technical Lead Manager** to join our growing team and help propel us toward this goal.

As a Technical Lead Manager, you will be expected to guide your teams through technical decisions, foster a people-first culture, advocate for continuous improvement, and strategically align the team's work with organizational objectives. You will lead by example through servant leadership, providing mentorship, promoting psychological safety, and driving accountability. You will actively contribute to Aplazo’s engineering culture of trust, ownership, and strategic impact.

**Key Responsibilities**:
Organizational Impact
- **OKR Alignment and Execution**: Understand, communicate, and execute against company and departmental OKRs. Ensure that the team's initiatives directly support Aplazo’s strategic goals.
- **Process Improvement**: Identify, implement, and champion process enhancements to optimize engineering workflows and productivity across the team and organization.
- **Cross-functional Collaboration**: Facilitate effective collaboration with Product, Design, Data, and Business teams to ensure technical and business alignment.

Team Leadership
- **Communication and Transparency**: Set clear expectations, provide continuous feedback, and ensure that information flows seamlessly between the team and leadership.
- **Empathy and People Development**: Cultivate a culture of inclusion, trust, and psychological safety. Prioritize employee well-being and career development.
- **Empowerment and Delegation**: Develop leadership within the team by delegating responsibility and promoting autonomy. Provide growth opportunities and encourage decision-making at all levels.

Technical Responsibilities
- **Technical Strategy**: Partner with Technical Leads to define technical direction and manage technical debt trade-offs. Maintain a high-level understanding of team architecture and decisions.
- **Growth and Mentorship**: Foster an environment of technical learning and mentorship. Facilitate knowledge sharing and skill development initiatives across the team.
- **Technical Collaboration**: Balance technical and business needs, resolve technical disagreements constructively, and champion high engineering standards.

Software Development Life Cycle and Planning
- **Effort Estimation and Planning**: Lead sprint and roadmap planning activities, ensuring accurate sizing, prioritization, and backlog refinement.
- **Workflow Optimization**: Continuously monitor engineering processes to identify and address bottlenecks. Advocate for effective tools and practices that enable faster and higher-quality deliveries.
- **Small, Well-Defined Units of Work**: Drive a culture of delivering small, testable, and value-driven increments, supporting iterative progress and rapid feedback.

**Aplazo Engineering Competency Matrix**

This role is equal to a level **E4** in our **Engineering Competency Matrix**,** our internal career growth system for engineering. These are the minimum expectations for this position, but we are always willing to discuss bringing people on at more senior positions when appropriate. Reach out if you want to learn more about how we evaluate “seniority” at Aplazo.

**Requirements**:
Must have
- **Experience**: 5+ years in software engineering roles. 2+ years managing engineering teams (ideally in a scaling or high-growth environment).
- **Technical skills**:

- Strong technical background with ability to guide architecture discussions, code quality, and best practices.
- Familiarity with modern development workflows, CI/CD practices, cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), and agile methodologies.
- Comfort working within Jira, GitHub, and other modern SDLC tools.
- Familiarity with our tech stack: Backend/APIs (Java/Spring, Python, Go), Frontend (JS/Angular/React), AWS tools (ECS, Lambdas), GCP tools (BigQuery, pub-sub), DB (Postgres, MongoDB), GraphQL, Ci/CD(Pulumi, Jenkins, CodeMagic), Observability (DataDog). Strong technical documentation and knowledge-sharing practices.
- **Leadership Skills**:

- Proven experience leading cross-functional, high-performing teams.
- Strong foundation in people leadership practices, including one-on-ones, performance management, coaching, and career development.
Servant leadership approach focused on enabling and amplifying others’ impact.
- **Soft skills**:

- Exceptional communication skills (verbal and written) in Spanish and proficiency in English for cross-functional collaboration.
- Ability to manage ambiguity, prioritize competing demands, and make principled trade-offs.
- Growth mindset, emotional intelligence, and a passion for mentoring others.
- You have a growth mindset and seek mentorship to be your best selves.
- **Nice to have**
- Experience in fintech,