Java Core Platform Team Lead, (Ukraine, only Vinnytsia)

We are looking for a Team Lead in Ukraine to lead a team responsible for the stability and evolution of a core platform.

The team works with an existing platform, resolves customer issues, ensures production stability, and gradually modernizes the legacy system by moving functionality toward separate services. The role combines team leadership with hands-on technical involvement.

Why this role matters: 
Core Platform is the stability anchor of the whole model. The team keeps the existing
product reliable, resolves customer issues fast, and shrinks the legacy surface — so the rest of the organization can build the future safely on top of it.

The mission
Keep the existing platform stable and customers happy. Lead a team of ~7 engineers that owns the monolith and core services: customer-issue resolution, bug fixing, critical stability and API-level access — with a full stop on net-new features in legacy, and a steady path of separating the monolith toward services.

What you'll do
• Lead the team — ~7 Core Platform engineers in Ukraine: 1:1s, growth, capacity, performance and hiring.
• Own customer-issue resolution — prioritize the backlog with Product and Support; drive MTTR and backlog age down, month over month.
• Own monolith stability — incidents and on-call, root-cause discipline, performance and scale hot-spots
(MySQL/Aurora, Redis, Tomcat).
• Guard the boundary — enforce the “no net-new in legacy” rule; fixes ship on their own safe path, decoupled from new feature code.
• Shrink the legacy surface — plan and execute monolith separation: facades, service extraction, API-level access for the new stack.
• Partner with Quality — triage escaped defects together, support regression coverage of existing functionality, sign off on fix releases.
• Report against targets — own the team's scorecard metrics: customer-issue MTTR, backlog age, change-fail rate on fixes.

What you'll own (outcomes)
• Severe (P0–P1) backlog driven to zero — and kept there.
• Customer-issue MTTR reduced from weeks to days, sustainably.
• A monolith stable enough that the rest of R&D can move fast on top of it.
What you bring
• 7+ years of backend engineering on production SaaS systems — Java strongly preferred (our monolith is Java/JSP), plus SQL at scale (MySQL/Aurora).
• 2+ years leading an engineering team — a player-coach who still reads code, reviews PRs and joins the hard incidents.
• Proven ownership of production: on-call, incident management, root-cause analysis, observability (Datadog or similar).
• Experience sustaining and modernizing a large legacy codebase — refactoring, strangler/facade patterns, service extraction.
• A quality mindset: you treat customer issues as the top of the backlog, not the bottom.
SysAid · Core Platform Team Lead — role profile for recruiting Page 1sysaid R&D · AI-Native Organization · Careers
• Comfortable working with AI-assisted development tools — or strong motivation to adopt them.
• Professional English; based in Vinnitsya

Nice to have
• ITSM / enterprise SaaS domain experience.
• Hands-on AWS (EC2, RDS/Aurora, ElastiCache) and CI/CD ownership.
• Experience running distributed teams alongside an Israel-based leadership group.

Why join
• A rare mandate: one team, clear ownership of platform stability for an entire product company — with real authority over what ships.
• A growing Ukraine engineering center (~2× this year) — leadership roles, modern AI-native tooling, and a direct line to the VP R&D.
• The Core Platform residency is where engineers earn their way into the delivery pods — you'll lead the team the whole org passes through.