Tech Lead (Part-Time)

Company Description

Punch Gaming is an early stage gaming startup currently preparing for launch and fundraising. The company is building a consumer facing platform that blends real money gaming mechanics, digital rewards, and gamified consumer experiences. Team members work directly with the founding team and have real influence over product and technology decisions.

Role Description

This is a hands-on, part-time Tech Lead role based in Tel Aviv, with flexibility for partial remote work. The Tech Lead will collaborate closely with the founding team, own technical decisions within their scope, and help establish the standards and practices the platform will scale on. There is real potential for this role to grow into a larger technical leadership position post launch.

Responsibilities

• Audit the existing backend, payment, wallet, and ledger infrastructure ahead of launch.
• Identify launch blockers, technical risks, and reliability gaps in money-critical flows.
• Directly improve and harden payment flows, transaction handling, idempotency, reconciliation, and async event processing.
• Review and improve event-driven flows, including webhooks, retries, background jobs, and failure recovery.
• Own technical decisions within the agreed scope and communicate tradeoffs clearly to the founding team.
• Help establish engineering standards, review practices, and production-readiness expectations for the platform.
• Support the transition from pre-launch infrastructure to a scalable post-launch technical foundation.

Qualifications

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with production ownership of payment, wallet, ledger, fintech, gaming, marketplace, or other money critical systems
• Hands-on proficiency with TypeScript, Node.js, Supabase (PostgreSQL), Vercel, and Railway
• Proven experience with payment infrastructure, ledger and wallet systems, idempotency, transaction safety, and reconciliation
• Experience building reliable async flows including webhooks, retries, and background jobs
• Demonstrated ability to audit an existing codebase, identify risks and blockers, and resolve them directly
• Experience designing and building scalable distributed systems
• Comfortable using AI tools to accelerate development while maintaining strong engineering judgment and production level code quality; strong advantage
• Familiarity with infrastructure, DevOps, observability, and monitoring is a plus
• Strong communication skills for working directly with a founding team in a fast moving environment