Team Lead

Tenexti is an emerging software development company based in Lviv. We specialize in creating innovative solutions, delivering high-quality results, and helping our clients turn their ideas into reality. With a passion for technology and a commitment to excellence, we strive to build lasting partnerships and drive meaningful impact through our work.

We are looking for a Team Lead to join our team. This is the most important hire we will make this year.

🧑‍💻 What we expect from the ideal candidate:

• You have real Java behind you, and you are comfortable in a large old codebase. We need someone who can open code written by people who are long gone, work out why it is the way it is, and change it without breaking it.
• You have genuinely led people, not held the title. You have been responsible for the output of a team, and for what happened when that output was wrong. You lead by example — the standard you hold other people to is the one you visibly work to yourself.
• You manage risk by instinct. Feature flags, gradual rollout, rollbacks you have actually tested, thinking about blast radius before you merge, knowing which doors only open one way. Our production system is business-critical and a bad night is not an incident, it is a business event.
• You listen first. Working with a customer starts with hearing the real problem rather than the solution someone arrived with. Almost every expensive mistake in this kind of work could have been prevented by one more question at the beginning.
• You can say no, and you can say it with a reason. Not everything worth asking for is worth building. You can explain cost, complexity and ROI plainly, hold the position when it is pushed, and change it the moment the argument against you turns out to be better than yours.
• You do the scoping with the engineers, and you close the loop afterwards. You assess what has to be done together with the people who will do it, and then you assess what was actually done. Both halves. The second one is the half most people skip.
• You own things and stand behind them. When something goes wrong, you are accountable for it, and you do not spend the meeting looking for whose fault it was. This is the quality we check hardest.
• You think about the end user and about money. You understand ROI. You understand how the thing you are building helps the business earn, and you can argue about what to build next in those terms rather than only in technical ones.
• Your English is strong, spoken and written. You will spend a meaningful part of every week live on calls in English — being interrupted, having the subject changed mid-sentence, and having to be clear anyway — and writing clearly afterwards. This is a hard requirement, not a box to tick.
• You are open-minded and eager to learn. You are interested in modern tools, patterns and engineering approaches — AI-assisted development in particular — and you are excited to apply them in a real production system rather than in a side project.

💡 What you will do:

• Be the technical counterpart to the CEO of the customer’s company. He is American, sharp, direct, not technical, and there is something on fire most days. He will bring you problems, ideas and complaints — three at a time, half-formed, usually at speed. You have to want that conversation, not merely tolerate it.
• Turn loud, half-formed business problems into deliverables. There is no business analyst here and requirements do not arrive pre-chewed. You ask the questions, define the outcome, write down what we are explicitly not doing, and cut a first milestone small enough that being wrong about it costs two weeks instead of two quarters.
• Then actually deliver them. Milestones, sequencing, and saying early and plainly when something will not land — while there is still time to do something about it.
• Lead six engineers and set the engineering standard. You decide who works on what, how work is sliced, and what “good enough” means here. A part-time DevOps engineer and a project manager work alongside you.
• Grow the engineers around you. You will run technical one-on-ones, mentor, review seriously, and make the people on this team better than they were when you arrived. We treat code reviews as a real part of the work, not a formality.
• Work alongside a project manager without either of you taking over the other’s half. She runs the schedule, the ceremonies, the coordination and the chasing. You own technical direction, delegation and the technical conversation with the customer.
• Own risk on complex, high-stakes changes. Migrations inside a system that cannot stop, rollout plans, tested rollbacks, and a clear view of what breaks if you are wrong. You will be the person who decides whether a change is safe to make tonight.
• Run incident command. When production breaks, you coordinate the fix, decide what gets rolled back, and tell the customer what is happening while it is still happening.
• Argue about priorities in business terms. You will push back on requests that will not pay for themselves, make the case for the ones that will, and be trusted because your numbers hold up when someone checks them.
• Drive AI-first engineering. Agentic tooling and AI-assisted development are part of this mandate, not an experiment on the side. The customer is already asking for it and we intend to be good at it.

Team and Customer

We are a team of engineers based in Lviv working for a US-based customer. On our side there are six engineers, a part-time DevOps engineer, and a project manager. All engineers and all architectural decisions are here locally — no overseas knowledge holders blocking you.

There is no business analyst, and there is nobody between you and the person who wants the thing built. You will work directly with the CEO of the customer’s company. There are also no layers, no approval chains and no process that exists for its own sake. That is the best thing about working here and also the hardest one.

Our customer is not backed by venture capital but by reliable business revenue. The business has been running for more than eight years and is self-funded, and we do not experience pressure to cut roles in Ukraine due to “country risks,” which has unfortunately become quite common lately.

We are hiring because of business growth. By leveraging technology and working with smart people, we empower the business to grow further.

Product

We work on a high-stakes data synchronization system that handles hundreds of thousands of records in real time. The product ensures data consistency between multiple systems while operating under strict rate limits and performance constraints.

This is a fascinating technical challenge—not a simple CRUD application, but a complex, performance-sensitive system where every optimization matters, stability is non-negotiable, and creative problem-solving is part of the daily routine.

🚀 Our technology stack

Frontend

• React 19
• TypeScript
• Tailwind CSS
• Ant Design
• TanStack Query
• TanStack Router
• Vite
• GraphQL
• Vue.js legacy frontend—to be rewritten in React
• Modern frontend tooling and best practices

Backend

• TypeScript, Node.js, and NestJS
• Java 21 and Kotlin, with an active migration toward Kotlin
• Spring Boot
• Prisma
• MongoDB
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• RabbitMQ
• Hasura and GraphQL
• GoRules for complex business logic

Infrastructure and DevOps

• Kubernetes
• ArgoCD and GitHub Actions
• OpenSearch for logs
• Prometheus and Grafana for metrics and traces

Why choose this project and team?

• Reserving from army mobilization
• Stable project that has been running successfully for more than eight years, with consistent revenue growth.
• Entire engineering team located in Ukraine, with all architectural decisions made locally.
• Mission-critical production system where your decisions directly affect business outcomes.
• Real engineering challenges, including performance optimization, rate limiting, data consistency, distributed workflows, and large-scale refactoring.
• End-to-end feature ownership, with the opportunity to work across both frontend and backend systems.
• Opportunity to work on a high-load production system consisting of both a monolith and microservices and to influence how it is designed and shaped.

Perks and Benefits

• 🏋️‍♂️ Gym compensation
• 🪖 Reserving from army mobilization
• 🏝 18 days of paid vacation, public holidays, and paid sick leave
• 💻 Modern technical equipment: an Apple silicon MacBook
• 🇬🇧 English lessons
• ⏱️ Flexible working hours and no time trackers
• ✈️ Possible trips to the USA when the war ends. Before the war, we flew there twice, and we loved it :)

If you have read this far, please start your message with “Glory to Ukraine!” Thank you!

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