Development Team Lead

About the Role

At Second Nature AI, we're building a cutting-edge, AI-powered conversation platform that lives in the browser, real-time audio, WebSockets, and everything that comes with it. We're looking for a Full Stack Team Lead, backend-oriented, someone who can go deep on Python and distributed systems, stay comfortable enough in React to guide a team that owns both ends of the stack, and help shape how a small, fast-moving engineering team works and grows.

Key Responsibilities

• Own backend architecture, APIs, and infrastructure end to end, with hands-on involvement in frontend work where needed.

• Lead and grow a small team of engineers across different experience levels, from technical mentoring to career development.

• Set the tone for incident response, on-call availability, and production reliability.

• Adapt the team's direction as the company grows, and take the lead in shaping how the team works rather than just reacting to change.

• Build a culture of open feedback, where the team's input genuinely shapes the roadmap.

• Represent the team's needs to company leadership, including on how and where people work.

• Participate in code reviews and design discussions, and mentor team members directly.

Qualifications

• 8+ years of hands-on development experience, with deep expertise in Python and backend architecture.

• Strong working knowledge of React and modern frontend practices, comfortable owning full stack features when needed.

• Experience with distributed, async systems.

• Strong SQL and relational database skills: PostgreSQL, query performance, safe migrations.

• Real startup experience, ideally more than one company, including exposure to production incidents.

• A track record of developing engineers at different levels, not just excelling as an individual contributor.

• A people-first leadership style. Explicitly not a fit: someone purely focused on output who doesn't see the people behind the work.

Bonus Points

• Django and/or FastAPI experience.

• Production observability and performance debugging: Datadog, tracing, root-causing issues across the stack.

• Exposure to cloud platforms (AWS/GCP), Docker, or Kubernetes.

• Comfortable making hybrid and remote calls case by case.