R&D Team Leader

Optimove is a global marketing tech company, recognized as a Leader by Forrester and a Challenger by Gartner. We work with some of the world's most exciting brands, such as Sephora, Staples, and Entain, who love our thought-provoking combination of art and science. With a strong product, a proven business, and the DNA of a vibrant, fast-growing startup, we're on the cusp of our next growth spurt. It's the perfect time to join our team of ~500 thinkers and doers across NYC, LDN, TLV, and other locations, where 2 of every 3 managers were promoted from within. Growing your career with Optimove is basically guaranteed.

The Opportunity

Join Optimove's core technology group to design the engines at the heart of our product. Our group builds highly scalable systems that process terabytes of data daily—driving continuous modernization of our infrastructure and services. As Team Leader, you'll lead an agile team of backend/data engineers, remain hands-on, and be responsible for planning, executing, and delivering development tasks that power our platform.

Responsibilities

• Lead and Execute – Take over a team of 6 that develops and maintains systems that process TBs of data.
• Innovate – Tackle advanced software engineering challenges, mainly in big data batch processing.
• Own – products from ideation through planning and development to production and monitoring.
• Stay hands-on with Vibe coding, driving the team through a transition to coding with agents.
• Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps, Customer Success, and peer R&D teams to deliver measurable business impact.
• Champion engineering excellence, accountability, knowledge sharing, and a culture of innovation within the team.
  
  

• 4+ years in backend/data development, including large-scale systems.
• 1–3 years of technical leadership as a senior engineer, tech leader, TL, or staff engineer.
• Owned a complex event-driven system.
• Proven experience in architecting large scale data-driven systems and/or large batch ETLs
  
  

• Strong communication skills and ability to break down projects into small deployable units.
• Patience to mentor with a focus on actionable milestones.
• Take ownership and know how to filter essence from noise.
• Hands-on Experience working with:
• Python, plus at least one backend language (Java/.NET).
• SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Data Warehouses.
• Data engineering frameworks: Apache Airflow, Apache Spark, Hadoop, Kafka, Snowflake, Databricks.
• Designing and communicating contracts.
• Designing and building solutions for the cloud
  
  

• Fluent in English, able to work in a multi-language environment.
• Hands-on Experience working with:
• Deploying and managing software on GCP.
• CI/CD pipelines.
• Terraform / CloudFormation / Ansible.