Technical Lead

**Job description**:
**About meinUnterricht**:
meinUnterricht is a leading education technology platform serving tens of thousands of teachers across Germany, the broader DACH region, and the rest of the world.

We're building the future of digital teaching by providing educators with high-quality learning materials, intelligent search, and collaborative tools that make lesson planning more effective and enjoyable.

We're looking for a Technical Lead who combines deep technical expertise with strong leadership and people management skills. You'll lead one of our cross-functional engineering teams, driving technical excellence while mentoring and growing the team members. This role requires someone who loves writing code but is equally passionate about enabling others to do their best work.

You'll work at the intersection of technology and education, making architectural decisions that directly impact how teachers prepare for classes and how students learn.

**What you'll do**:
**Technical Leadership**:

- Lead architectural decisions for a microservices environment built on Node.js/TypeScript, React, and multiple database technologies
- Design and implement scalable solutions across our distributed system (MongoDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Neo4j, ElasticSearch, Redis)
- Drive technical strategy for your team's domain, balancing innovation with pragmatic delivery
- Own critical integrations with external services (AWS, Zuora subscription management, PSPDFKit document engine, AI/ML via Bedrock)
- Establish and maintain engineering best practices: code review standards, testing strategies, CI/CD improvements
- Stay hands-on: actively contribute code, conduct thorough code reviews, and pair with team members on complex challenges
- Lead technical discovery and spike work for new features or architectural changes

**People & Team Management**:

- Directly manage 3 - 5 engineers with varying experience levels
- Conduct regular 1:1s, provide constructive feedback, and support career development
- Facilitate team ceremonies and ensure effective collaboration across frontend, backend, and infrastructure
- Recruit, interview, and onboard new team members
- Identify skill gaps and create growth opportunities through challenging work and mentorship
- Handle performance management, salary reviews, and promotions

**Hands-On Development**:

- Write high-quality production code in TypeScript/Node.js (Hapi.js, Express) and React, effectively utilizing AI coding assistants (Cursor, Claude, GitHub Copilot)
- Implement features across the full stack: APIs, frontend components, data pipelines, infrastructure
- Debug complex production issues spanning multiple services and databases
- Optimize performance bottlenecks in document processing, search indexing, or async workflows
- Contribute to shared infrastructure: Docker configurations, monitoring, observability

**You come with**:
**Technical Requirements**:

- 5+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a technical leadership role
- Strong proficiency in Node.js/TypeScript and modern JavaScript (ES6+)
- Frontend experience with React (or similar frameworks)
- Distributed systems expertise: experience with microservices architectures, message queues, async workflows, and data consistency patterns
- Database versatility: comfortable working with both SQL and NoSQL databases; bonus if you've worked with graph databases or ElasticSearch
- Cloud infrastructure experience: AWS (S3, CloudFront, ECR) or equivalent cloud platform
- DevOps mindset: Docker/containerization, CI/CD pipelines, monitoring/observability tools
- API design: REST API best practices, authentication/authorization (JWT, OAuth)

**Leadership & People Skills**:

- Proven people management experience: you've led and grown engineers at different levels
- Strong mentorship abilities: you genuinely enjoy helping others grow and succeed
- Excellent communication: can explain complex technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders and provide clear, actionable feedback to engineers
- Collaborative mindset: you build consensus, navigate disagreements constructively, and create team alignment
- Growth-oriented: you invest in your team's development and create opportunities for them to learn
- Empathy and emotional intelligence: you understand that great engineering requires trust, psychological safety, and work-life balance

**Nice to Have**:

- Experience with payment/subscription systems (Stripe, Braintree, Zuora)
- Exposure to AI/ML integrations or recommendation systems
- Background in education technology or content management systems
- Experience with PDF processing or document annotation systems
- Familiarity with Neo4j or other graph databases
- Knowledge of search technologies (ElasticSearch, OpenSearch, Solr., Algolia)
- Open source contributions or technical writing/speaking

**Why us?**:

- Working for an organization with a clear purpose: to make teacher's work easier
- A dynamic work env