Engineering Team Lead

Team Lead Engineer

Kenect is a leading AI-powered texting and reputation management platform used by 10,000+ dealerships and service businesses across North America. We help companies streamline communication, respond faster, and drive real revenue by converting their main business line into a text-enabled number and unifying messaging, reviews, payments, and customer conversations in one simple platform.

What sets Kenect apart from other communication tools is our deep industry expertise and seamless integrations with the systems dealers already use. Teams trust us because our technology is easy to adopt, built for real-world workflows, and delivers measurable improvements in speed, customer satisfaction, and operational efficiency.

We're a fast-growing, mission-driven team building technology that strengthens human connection in a digital-first world and we're just getting started.

About This Role

We are looking for a senior-level engineer to step into a Team Lead role on one of our cross-functional product teams. In this position, you will split your time between hands-on individual contribution and guiding a team of engineers across the full stack. While your primary focus will be frontend development across our React-based web applications, you will also be expected to contribute meaningfully to our Java and Node.js backend services, and to help your team deliver cohesive, end-to-end solutions. You will work closely with Product and UX to deliver polished, performant user experiences while also driving backend API development as needed to move the team forward. Beyond writing great code, you will own the technical direction for your team, drive architectural decisions, break down complex projects into well-scoped work, and actively mentor engineers at every level. This is a role for someone who is passionate about the craft of software and equally energized by helping a team grow and deliver.

What You Will Be Doing

• Lead frontend development across our React and TypeScript web applications, while also contributing to Java and Node.js backend services to deliver complete, end-to-end features.
• Partner closely with Product and UX to translate requirements into well-scoped technical tasks, owning epic breakdown and ensuring your team has clarity before work begins.
• Serve as the primary technical voice for your team in architecture discussions, sprint planning, and cross-team collaboration, representing engineering tradeoffs and timelines clearly and consistently.
• Mentor and develop engineers at varying skill levels through code reviews, pair programming, 1:1s, and day-to-day coaching, with an eye toward growing ownership and autonomy across the team.
• Monitor team workflow metrics, facilitate retrospectives, and proactively identify and remove blockers to keep delivery moving and quality high.
• Own your team's technical debt backlog, propose and prioritize tech epics each quarter, and champion the documentation and architectural decisions that keep the codebase healthy over time.
• Oversee production reliability for your team's services, including on-call rotation management, incident response, and ensuring new code ships with proper monitoring and alerting in place.
• Participate in hiring, including interviewing candidates and making recommendations, and support onboarding of new team members as the team grows.

Skills & Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong concentration in frontend development using React and TypeScript, and comfort operating across the full stack when the work demands it.
• Proven experience leading or technically anchoring an engineering team in an agile environment, including owning sprint planning, epic breakdown, estimation, and retrospectives.
• Deep fluency in the frontend ecosystem including JavaScript, CSS/SASS, HTML, and the DOM, with a track record of building high-quality, accessible, and well-tested UIs.
• Solid full stack capability with backend proficiency in both Node.js and Java Spring Boot, including the ability to design and integrate REST or GraphQL APIs and work with relational databases such as PostgreSQL.
• Experience working within a microservices architecture deployed to a cloud platform (GCP or AWS), including an understanding of CI/CD pipelines, containerization (Docker/Kubernetes), and production monitoring.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers, conduct meaningful code reviews, and raise the technical bar of a team through coaching and example rather than top-down direction.
• Strong instincts around code quality, test coverage, and system reliability, with hands-on experience managing incidents, post-mortems, and on-call responsibilities.
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to translate ambiguous product requirements into clear technical plans and represent your team effectively across engineering leadership, product, and design.

Our Company Values We Hope You Showcase

• Unwavering Customer Obsession
• See It, Solve It, Get It Done
• Build, Adapt, Win

What Kenect Offers!

• Health, Dental, Vision, Life & Disability Insurance
• Your birthday is a paid day off
• Onsite gym
• Breakroom full of snacks and drinks
• Convenient location next to freeway entrance/exit

We believe in hiring self-motivated team members who can run alongside us without needing to be "managed" along the way. Yes, we have managers and 1:1s. Yes, we believe in giving open two-way feedback. We also believe in having team members that can run without the daily guidance that some companies prefer.

Kenect is an equal opportunity employer. We are an organization comprised of people of all kinds of backgrounds, and believe this mix is precisely what makes us strong. All employment decisions at Kenect are based on business needs, job requirements, and individual qualifications without regard to race, color, religion or belief, family or parental status, or any other status protected under federal, state, or local law.