Team Lead Python Engineer

About the project
Our client is a global enterprise software company building an AI-powered, RAG-based documentation platform delivered as production-grade SaaS. The platform is a set of ~10 containerized microservices — predominantly Python, with React front-ends — running fully on Microsoft Azure (App Services, Functions, Data Factory, AI Search, Blob Storage, Key Vault).

The team is hardening the platform for production: standardizing CI/CD, consolidating repositories into a single monorepo, introducing observability and a structured test-automation framework, and preparing for multi-region rollout (US, Europe, Asia). Development is heavily AI-assisted — currently 15–20 merge requests per week — so disciplined review and strong test automation are central to keeping quality and velocity in balance.

The client's existing team spans the US and India. This role is intended to anchor delivery from an overlapping European time zone: starting as a hands-on technical lead and growing into a self-managed scrum team of 3–4 engineers over the following one to two quarters, with the client's lead moving toward a product-owner / vision role.
 

What you'll do

• Act as technical lead for an embedded engineering team, starting hands-on and growing it from ~2 to 3–4 engineers toward a self-managed scrum team
• Own technical design and architecture decisions across CI/CD, observability, and platform hardening
• Lead code reviews and raise the quality bar — particularly important given AI-assisted development is generating 15–20 merge requests per week
• Introduce and enforce a pyramid-based test-automation / QA framework (unit → integration → E2E) that makes high merge-request throughput safe and sustainable
• Define and drive non-functional requirements — performance, reliability, scalability — across all services
• Run and support sprint ceremonies, coordinate cross-team dependencies, and act as the delivery anchor so the client's lead can focus on vision, acceptance, and dependency management
• Provide CI/CD and GitLab knowledge transfer to adjacent teams that have skill gaps in pipeline work
• Stay hands-on — write Python, build pipelines, and contribute to the test framework directly (this is a working technical lead, not a pure people-manager)
  
   

Must-have skills

• Senior-level Python — the platform is ~98% Python
• Proven technical leadership of small, distributed teams: design ownership, code review, mentoring, and sprint ceremony facilitation
• Strong CI/CD experience — GitLab CI required; GitHub Actions a strong plus (a migration to GitHub Enterprise is in progress)
• Hands-on Azure experience (App Services, Functions, Key Vault, Storage)
• Test-automation strategy and QA framework design (pyramid model)
• Docker / containers and working knowledge of Infrastructure-as-Code principles (Terraform or Bicep)
• Azure observability with Application Insights
• Strong English and stakeholder communication — comfortable operating across US, European, and Indian time zones