ABOUT LAGO At Lago, we're on a mission to make Monetization simpler for tech companies. As the leading open-source billing platform, we help businesses build flexible pricing models and scale with confidence. We've raised over $22 million in funding from top-tier investors including Y Combinator and FirstMark. Our platform has garnered around 10K stars on GitHub, a testament to our active and growing developer community. Companies such as PayPal, CoreWeave, Synthesia, and Mistral.ai http://Mistral.ai choose Lago for their billing. And we have barely spent any money on Marketing or Ads so far. We're a team of ambitious, focused individuals who solve hard problems with excellence and accountability. At Lago, we value reliability and proactivity. We trust each other to own tasks, drive them to completion, and continuously improve them. While we encourage you to try fast and “fail fast”, we also expect you to learn fast: make mistakes, but don't make the same one twice. If you're excited by challenges and want to grow alongside a high-performing, supportive team, this is the place for you. OVERVIEW We're hiring an Engineering Squad Lead to take full ownership of one of the focused domains here at Lago: shipping features, keeping production healthy, and coordinating the team around you. This is a role that blends hands-on technical contribution with operational leadership. You'll stay close to the code while also being the person who keeps the squad moving: scoping work with Product, unblocking engineers, owning production incidents, and making sure the team is building with quality and velocity. You won't be handed a fully-formed system to maintain. Lago is a fast-moving product in a complex domain, billing infrastructure where precision and reliability genuinely matter. You'll need to make sound architectural decisions quickly, communicate trade-offs clearly, and hold a high bar without slowing the team down. WHAT YOU'LL BE DOING Technology - Share technical authority with the Staff Engineer for your squad's domain: evaluate trade-offs together and drive architecture decisions - Stay hands-on: code review, prototyping, contributing to critical paths - Maintain code quality and review standards within the squad - Own the code health of your domain Delivery - Own the squad's roadmap execution for the quarter - Run sprint planning, keep work moving, and unblock engineers day-to-day - Ensure the squad is prepared for biweekly product demos and decide who presents - Act as the primary engineering point of contact for Product: scope features, communicate trade-offs, and align on priorities Production - Own production health for your squad's domain: monitor dashboards (Grafana, Sentry), respond to alerts, and resolve incidents - Triage and resolve customer-reported issues within SLA targets, working in coordination with Customer Success - Monitor and address CVEs and security vulnerabilities within your domain People - Coordinate a squad of up to 10 engineers - Run operational 1:1s, give day-to-day feedback, and flag performance signals to the Head of Engineering - Coordinate the onboarding of new team members into the squad Process - Define and adjust the squad's ways of working: balancing agility and discipline as the team and product evolve - Drive engineering excellence: track DORA metrics, reduce cycle time, raise the quality bar - Continuously improve how the squad works based on team feedback and results WHO YOU ARE - A credible technical leader who can collaborate closely with engineers because you're still in the work - A clear communicator who can scope a feature with a PM, explain a production incident to a non-technical stakeholder, and give direct feedback to an engineer — all in the same week - Operationally strong: you keep the trains running without needing a system to tell you what needs attention - Someone who cares about team health as much as delivery — you notice when an engineer is stuck or disengaged and do something about it - Comfortable holding a high quality bar in a fast-moving environment: you know when to move quickly and when to slow down and do it right WHO YOU'RE NOT - You're not someone who manages from a distance, you stay close to the work and the people doing it - You're not a blocker — decisions get made, trade-offs get communicated, and the team keeps moving - You're not indifferent to production — a customer incident or a flaky dashboard bothers you until it's resolved - You're not a siloed thinker — you collaborate across squads, with Product, and with CS without needing to be asked REQUIREMENTS - 8+ years of software engineering experience (ideally 2/3+ in a Squad or Tech Lead position), with a strong command of backend systems and production environments - Track record of shipping reliable, high-quality software in a fast-moving product company - Comfortable working in a complex technical domain: distributed systems, APIs, data integrity, or similar - Strong communication skills — written and verbal, with the ability to bridge engineering and product effectively - Experience owning production: incident response, monitoring, on-call, SLA ownership - Recent experience working with a Ruby on Rails codebase Nice to have - Experience in billing, fintech, or usage-based pricing infrastructure - Familiarity with DORA metrics and engineering effectiveness frameworks - Background working in or contributing to open-source projects - Exposure to developer tooling or API-first product companies WHY JOIN LAGO? - Work with top-tier international talent: Join a team that values excellence, slope over intercept, and accountability. We have convinced top-tier investors and companies to trust us with mission-critical systems like billing. We have 12+ nationalities on the team and are building a global company with a global culture. - Shape the future of monetizat