R&D Team Lead (Runtime)

We are looking for a strong technical leader to lead our Runtime team - one of the most critical backend teams at Torq. The Runtime team owns the execution layer of all Torq automations, the core of our product. The team operates at a significant scale, processing hundreds of millions of steps and millions of security events every day in systems that simply cannot break.

You will lead a strong team of five senior engineers and take ownership of both the people and the technology. This role combines team management with deep technical leadership: developing engineers, setting the technical vision, leading design and architecture decisions, and staying close enough to the code to step in when needed.

What Will You Do?

• Lead, mentor, and develop a team of five experienced backend engineers.
• Own the team’s technical vision, priorities, execution, and long-term direction.
• Lead the design and implementation of architectural changes that keep our platform reliable at massive scale.
• Drive complex, cross-team projects and influence technical decisions beyond your immediate team.
• Lead production incidents and post-mortems, and continuously raise the bar for reliability and operational excellence.
• Identify risks and problems before they impact production, and build the processes and infrastructure needed to prevent them.
• Stay close to the technology through design discussions, code reviews, debugging, and hands-on contribution when needed.
• Use data to understand how customers interact with the platform and turn emerging use cases into new product capabilities.
• Help lead significant technical initiatives, including the evolution from GCP toward a Multi-Cloud architecture.
• Work with modern AI tools such as Cursor and Claude Code as a core part of the development workflow, while maintaining deep technical understanding and high-quality standards.

What Should You Bring to the Table?

• At least 2 years of experience managing an engineering team.
• A strong backend engineering background with experience building complex, high-scale production systems.
• Proven ability to lead technical vision, System Design, and architecture discussions.
• Experience leading meaningful projects end-to-end and working across multiple teams.
• Strong production ownership, including leading incidents, post-mortems, and reliability improvements.
• A hands-on mindset and the ability to step into code, debugging, and code reviews when needed.
• Experience mentoring and developing senior engineers.
• Experience with Cloud infrastructure and services.
• Familiarity with Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, monitoring, and observability technologies.
• A strong testing mindset, including automated testing and production monitoring.
• Experience with Go - an advantage.
• Excellent communication skills and the ability to explain complex decisions clearly and simply.
• High ownership, curiosity, and a proactive, can-do approach.