Technical Team Lead, Contract (Hiring Immediately)

Who Are We?

Xcelirate develops technologically-advanced platforms which are accessed by thousands of users every minute! We are proud to offer a workplace where the sharpest developers come together to strategically plan and swiftly execute practices which see us maintain our existing market dominance and attain global expansion. We owe our success to our customers who have seen us grow across a decade, and our talented team who have made that growth possible!

What are we looking for?

You're a Principal-Level Engineer first. The tech lead title is almost incidental. It just means you're the person the team orbits around, because that's what happens naturally when you're the one who understands the system most deeply and keeps the clearest head under pressure.

The 10% that's people management fits inside your engineering work, not alongside it. You hire, you steer, you unblock, but you do it the way a strong engineer does everything: with good judgment, minimal ceremony, and no interest in making it a bigger deal than it is.

You are still, genuinely, happiest close to the code and driving projects forward. You are also more than happy to take ownership over driving them forward.

Programming languages don't impress you. You've used enough of them to treat them as what they are: different syntaxes for expressing the same fundamental ideas, some more suited to the problem than others, none worth being religious about. You've written things in languages that no longer exist, maintained systems built on frameworks that peaked at a conference talk in 2013, and learned the hard way that novelty and progress are not the same thing.

When you join a new codebase, you go quiet and start reading. You find the abstractions that are holding up weight, identify the ones that are just decorative, and build a mental model of the whole thing before you touch anything. Then you make one small, careful change, and the way it lands tells you everything you didn't yet know.

You have strong, well-earned instincts around performance. Hot-path optimisation, speculative execution, lazy initialisation: these feel obvious to you, and you've mostly stopped being surprised when they don't feel obvious to others. You know where latency actually hides, and it's rarely where the team thinks it is. You profile before you optimize, but you usually already know what you're going to find.

Your system design isn't flashy. It's load-bearing. You've seen enough over-engineered architectures to have a near-allergic reaction to complexity that isn't earning its keep. When you design something, it's because you've thought about what it needs to do in two years, not just the next sprint.

Once you've got your footing in the project, you'll build the team around it. You know how to hire for this kind of work. You're looking for engineers with genuine curiosity, sound instincts, and the humility to learn a system before trying to improve it. You'll form a team that can own hard problems. Getting that right is important to you, but it's not where you live.

Where you live is in the work itself. In a well-reasoned commit. In a system that behaves exactly as it should at 3am when nobody's watching. In the quiet satisfaction of a codebase that's a little more honest than it was before you touched it.

The homelab is always running something. You'll tell us about it if we ask, and we're asking.

If this reads less like a job description and more like a description of you, good. That's what we were going for.

• Manage your own and your team's time while adhering to priorities set by the company
• Own complex engineering problems end-to-end, from problem framing and design through to delivery and iteration
• Take responsibility for critical areas of the platform, ensuring they remain reliable, performant, and maintainable
• Build new features and improve existing ones across our platforms.
• Refactor legacy and modern codebases pragmatically, balancing long-term health with delivery needs
• Write tests (unit, integration, and end-to-end) to ensure software reliability.
• Be involved in every phase of the software lifecycle, from ideation to deployment.
• Participate in (and at times lead) deep technical discussions, helping drive sound decisions and trade-offs
• Work hands-on across backend and frontend systems, stepping in wherever the problem lives
• Identify inefficiencies and help streamline workflows, reducing unnecessary work.
• Collaborate closely with other senior engineers, raising the bar through example rather than authority
• Take ownership of your work, ensuring high-quality results and maintainable solutions.

Requirements

What will you bring along?