Techlead Principal Software Engineer

ROLE SUMMARY

This is the most senior individual contributor and team leadership role at Innovation Insight. You will be hands-on in the codebase, accountable for architectural decisions across multiple projects, and directly responsible for the technical output of the engineering teams you lead. You will report to and work alongside the CTO on delivery strategy, team capability, and technical standards.

We are not hiring a manager who used to code. We are hiring an engineer who also leads — someone whose technical credibility is current, whose architectural instincts are grounded in production experience, and who makes the engineers around them measurably better. If your last significant code contribution was two years ago, this role is not the right fit.

You will also be expected to deeply integrate AI tools into your own workflow and drive their adoption across the engineering team — not as a policy, but by demonstrating what is actually possible.

WHAT WE'RE LOOKING FOR

Technical Depth — MERN Stack

• 5+ years of hands-on full stack development with the MERN stack — MongoDB, Express.js, React.js, and Node.js — at a level where you are still writing production code, not just reviewing it
• Expert-level proficiency in NestJS for scalable backend architecture: module design, dependency injection, guards, interceptors, and event-driven patterns
• Expert-level proficiency in Next.js — App Router, SSR/SSG/ISR strategies, server components, API routes, and performance optimisation for production deployments
• Deep TypeScript across the full stack — advanced types, generics, utility types, strict null handling, and enforcing type safety across shared codebases
• Strong understanding of system design principles: designing for scale, fault tolerance, idempotency, eventual consistency, and graceful degradation under load
• Architectural pattern fluency: Microservices, event-driven architecture, CQRS, domain-driven design, and monorepo structures — with the judgment to choose the right pattern for the problem, not the most impressive one

Database Expertise — SQL & NoSQL

• Production-grade MongoDB experience: schema design, aggregation pipelines, indexing strategies, sharding, replica sets, and performance tuning for high-read and high-write workloads
• Strong PostgreSQL or MySQL experience: complex query optimisation, indexing, transactions, stored procedures, and schema migration management in production environments
• Understanding of when to use SQL versus NoSQL — and the ability to justify that decision under scrutiny with concrete reasoning based on data access patterns, consistency requirements, and scale
• Experience with Redis for caching, session management, pub/sub, and distributed locking — and understanding its failure modes
• Familiarity with database observability: query performance monitoring, slow query analysis, and proactive capacity planning

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Proven experience leading multiple concurrent software projects as a technical lead — owning architectural decisions, guiding engineers through complex implementations, and maintaining delivery quality across all projects simultaneously
• Ability to produce and own technical design documents, API contracts, database schemas, and system architecture diagrams before development begins — and hold the team to them
• Experience setting and enforcing coding standards, review processes, and engineering practices across a team without creating bureaucracy that slows delivery
• Track record of making high-stakes technical decisions under time pressure and defending those decisions with data — including the ability to reverse course quickly when wrong
• Experience with technical capacity planning: estimating engineering effort accurately at the project level, identifying resourcing risks early, and communicating them to management in business terms
• Ability to decompose complex, ambiguous product requirements into well-scoped engineering tasks — bridging the gap between what clients want and what engineers need to build it

Engineering Leadership & Team Development

• Experience leading and mentoring a team of 4–10 engineers — setting technical direction, conducting meaningful code reviews, unblocking individuals, and raising the overall capability of the team over time
• Strong code review culture: reviews that teach, not just approve or reject — with written feedback that improves the reviewer's credibility and the reviewee's skills simultaneously
• Experience identifying skill gaps in a team and addressing them through pairing, structured feedback, or targeted knowledge sharing — not just flagging them upward
• Ability to have direct, honest performance conversations with engineers — including delivering difficult feedback without wrapping it in so many qualifications that it loses meaning
• Comfortable leading across seniority levels: mentoring juniors, challenging seniors, and collaborating with peers as an equal

AI Tools & Development Acceleration

• Deep, practised expertise with AI-assisted development tools: Cursor AI, GitHub Copilot, Claude, ChatGPT, or equivalent — at a level where you are actively faster and higher quality because of them, with specific examples to demonstrate this
• Ability to drive AI tool adoption across an engineering team: identifying the highest-leverage use cases, demonstrating workflows, and building team habits — not just sending a Slack message recommending a tool
• Experience integrating AI capabilities into production products: LLM APIs, RAG pipelines, AI-powered features, or intelligent automation embedded in client applications
• Critical evaluation of AI output: the discipline to validate, refactor, and reject AI-generated code at the same standard as human-written code — and the ability to instil that discipline in the team

Automation — n8n & Make.com

• Hands-on production experience with n8n — workflow design, self-hosted deployment and maintenance, error handling, complex multi-step automations, and integrating with internal and external APIs
• Hands-on production experience with Make.com — scenario architecture, data transformation, error handling, and building automations that are maintainable, not just functional
• Ability to architect automation systems that are observable, recoverable, and documented — not fragile one-off workflows that nobody else can maintain
• Strategic thinking about automation: identifying which processes across engineering, delivery, and client operations are worth automating and prioritising them by impact
• Experience connecting AI models to automation pipelines — LLM-powered routing, dynamic content generation, and intelligent decision nodes within n8n or Make.com workflows

Communication & Stakeholder Management

• Strong written and verbal English — you will communicate directly with international clients on architecture, timelines, technical trade-offs, and delivery risk
• Ability to translate technical complexity into business language for non-technical stakeholders — without dumbing it down to the point of losing the actual risk or decision
• Experience presenting technical proposals, architecture reviews, and project status to senior leadership and clients — structured, clear, and prepared
• Comfortable delivering bad news early: a slipping deadline, a scope problem, a technical debt issue that needs investment — communicated with a proposed path forward, not just a problem statement
• Strong async communication habits: decisions documented, architectural rationale written down, and context preserved for the team without requiring everyone to be in the same room

Problem Solving

• Demonstrated ability to navigate deeply complex, multi-system technical problems — diagnosing root causes that cross service boundaries, data layers, and infrastructure without losing composure or structure
• Track record of resolving production incidents under pressure: rapid diagnosis, coordinated response, clear communication to stakeholders during the incident, and a written post-mortem after it
• Architectural problem-solving: the ability to identify that a feature request is actually an architectural problem in disguise — and address the root cause rather than building a workaround
• Proactive risk identification: spotting technical, delivery, and team risks before they escalate, with a mitigation plan ready before the conversation with management
• Honest self-assessment of what is and is not known — the confidence to say 'I need to investigate this before committing to an approach' rather than guessing under pressure

WHAT YOU WILL OWN

• Technical leadership across 3–5 concurrent client projects — architecture, code quality, delivery standards, and technical risk management across all of them simultaneously
• Hands-on development on the highest complexity features, critical path work, and foundational systems that set the standard for the rest of the team
• All major architectural decisions: technology selection, system design, database design, and integration patterns — documented and defensible
• Engineering team capability: code reviews, mentorship, technical onboarding, and raising the floor of what the team ships
• Automation strategy: identifying, designing, and owning automation workflows that improve engineering productivity and client delivery operations
• Technical input to client proposals, project scoping, and effort estimation — ensuring commercial commitments are grounded in engineering reality
• Direct collaboration with the CTO on engineering standards, hiring decisions, tooling choices, and the technical direction of the company
• Production health across your projects: deployment stability, performance, security posture, and incident response ownership

GOOD TO HAVE

• Experience with GraphQL: schema design, federation, subscriptions, and performance optimisation in production
• AWS at an advanced level: multi-account architecture, ECS/EKS for containerised workloads, CDK or Terraform for infrastructure as code, and cost optimisation at scale
• Exposure to ML engineering or AI infrastructure: model serving, embedding pipelines, vector databases, or LLM fine-tuning workflows
• Open source contributions or a public technical portfolio — code, writing, or talks that demonstrate depth in a public forum
• Experience in a consulting or IT services environment where technical context switches between client projects are a daily reality
• Familiarity with security engineering fundamentals: OWASP Top 10, secure API design, secrets management, and penetration testing awareness

WHAT WE EXPECT FROM YOU

You will be onsite in Lahore and present on the engineering floor. This is a role with real authority and real accountability in equal measure. You will have the final say on technical decisions — and you will own the consequences of those decisions in production. We expect you to exercise that authority with humility, not ego: the best technical decision is the one that serves the product and the team, not the one that demonstrates your knowledge.

We also expect you to be a multiplier. Every engineer on your team should be better six months after working with you than they were before. That is how we measure technical leadership here — not by the elegance of your architecture diagrams, but by the capability of the team you leave behind.

Send us your cv at careers@innovation-insight.com

Pay: Rs300,000.00 - Rs330,000.00 per month

Work Location: In person