Product Platform Engineer (Technical Lead)

Industry: Navigation Technology

Location: Austin, TX (Hybrid, 2 days per week in office)

Employer: Confidential

Employment Type: W2, full-time

Salary: Based on experience and fit.

About the Company

Our client is building an offline GPS-free positioning system using vehicle sensor data, maps, and a proprietary AI engine. Their technology serves government, military, automotive, logistics, environmental, and emergency service clients. Company culture is fast-paced, mission-driven, technical, and highly collaborative. Candidates must be based in Austin or willing to relocate due to travel, on-site testing, and upcoming contracts requiring security clearance.

About the Role

As Product Platform Engineer and technical lead of the Product Platform team, you will own the client's Android app hands-on and lead a team working across maps and data pipelines, device management and provisioning, and an imagery ML model.

Roughly 60% of the role is hands-on engineering and 40% is technical leadership: running the team's standup and planning, breaking projects down and delegating them, reviewing the team's work, making technical calls across the platform, and owning app releases.

Our client is looking for a generalist with real range, not a mobile specialist. The ideal candidate has led a small team while still writing code, gives senior engineers outcomes rather than tasks, and moves fast in a small team where everyone builds.

Responsibilities

Own the client's Android app (React Native) end to end, hands-on, including releases and integration with the company's in-vehicle hardware.
Act as technical lead for the Product Platform team: run standup and planning, break projects into deliverables, and delegate them.
Make technical and architecture decisions across the platform, including mobile, backend services, cloud infrastructure, and data pipelines.
Review the team's work for design quality and test coverage, using AI review tools where useful, and push back when an approach is wrong.
Contribute hands-on beyond the app when needed, on AWS services (Lambda, Batch, ECS, S3, Aurora), Python, React, and Docker.
Ship useful versions quickly and improve them iteratively.

Requirements

6+ years of professional software engineering experience.
Production experience building backend services and cloud infrastructure, including containers. AWS preferred.
Has owned a production Android app end to end, including releases, as one part of a broader engineering background.
Recent experience as the technical lead of a small team while still writing code: breaking down projects, delegating work, and making architecture decisions.
Strong technical judgment on other engineers' work: understands the design decisions behind a change, spots when an approach is wrong, and makes sure it is properly tested.
Owns a car (testing involves driving with the app running).
Candidates must be based in Austin or willing to relocate
Uses AI coding agents and AI review tools day-to-day in real engineering work, and validates what they produce.

Soft Skills

Leads through outcomes, not micromanagement, and works well with senior, independent engineers.
Hands-on builder who still writes code most of the week.
Comfortable pushing back with clear reasoning.
Bias toward action, iteration, automation, and shipping.
Comfortable in a fast-moving, small-team environment with evolving priorities.
Excellent verbal and written English communication skills.

Nice to Have

Experience with device fleets or MDM.
Embedded or headless deployments.
Geospatial or machine learning exposure.
Hands-on experience with Python, React and Docker.
Native Android (Kotlin or Java), or apps that talk to hardware over Bluetooth or USB.

Product Platform Engineer (Technical Le...