Team Lead, Platform Engineering

Why You’ll Love This Job

As the Team Lead for Platform Engineering, you will play a pivotal role in leading the vision and execution of our core identity and access management systems. You will lead a talented team of engineers, guiding them to deliver high-performance solutions that secure how thousands of school districts interact with our platform.

You’ll thrive here if you are passionate about both the strategic and human sides of leadership—someone who can architect secure, scalable systems while developing people and fostering a culture of ownership. This is your opportunity to shape Apptegy’s platform roadmap and act as a bridge between product, design, and engineering.

What You’ll Do

• Lead and Manage the Platform Engineering Team: Provide day-to-day guidance, mentorship, and support to a team of engineers. Foster a culture of ownership, learning, and innovation while helping each team member reach their full potential.
• Drive Strategic Platform Initiatives: Partner with engineering and product leadership to define and execute Apptegy’s identity and access strategy. Align technical efforts with business goals and ensure authentication capabilities enhance user experiences across our product suite.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serve as the key liaison between engineering, product management, design, and leadership teams. Translate technical insights into business value and ensure smooth communication across functions.
• Project Execution & Delivery: Keep projects moving forward through clear direction, accountability, and prioritization. Remove blockers, communicate progress, and ensure timely, high-quality delivery of platform-driven features.
• Technical Oversight: Provide technical leadership in the design and architecture of our Authentication and Authorization systems. Ensure best practices for security, observability, and clean code are adopted across the engineering organization.
• Mentorship & Growth: Champion professional development for your team—coaching engineers by reviewing code, collaborating on design documents, offering constructive feedback, performing annual reviews, and identifying growth opportunities.

What You’ll Bring

• Proven technical leadership, including 2+ years of experience leading or managing an engineering team. This requires effectively balancing the pursuit of technical excellence with the development and growth of team members.
• Growth-minded and strategic: You have experience driving the design and implementation of large-scale initiatives for SaaS products and are comfortable balancing day-to-day tactical needs with long-term strategic goals in a high-growth environment.
• Experience with Identity and Access: You have a working knowledge of how to implement and scale Identity Providers (IdP) and auth frameworks. You’ve ideally spent time working with tools like FusionAuth, Auth0, or Devise.
• Familiarity with Auth Protocols: You are comfortable discussing and implementing OAuth 2.0, OpenID Connect (OIDC), or SAML flows, and you understand the importance of secure token management and MFA.
• An Agile and "Quality First" mindset: You thrive in environments with high autonomy and responsibility. You enjoy facilitating agile ceremonies and believe in the power of thorough code reviews and "Security by Design."
• Exceptional Communication skills: You can translate complex technical security concepts for non-technical stakeholders and foster an inclusive environment for your team.

What Helps You Stand Out

• Experience with Ruby on Rails, our core tech stack.
• Hands-on experience with FusionAuth.
• Familiarity with AWS, Docker, or Kubernetes.
• Exceptional Technical Leadership: Your ability to provide clear technical direction, mentor engineers, and effectively communicate complex technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Strategic Problem-Solver: You don't just solve problems; you anticipate future trends and strategically position the product suite and engineering organization to capitalize on them.