Engineering Team Lead - Email Security

We are looking for an Engineering Team Lead to run the team that builds and operates this product line. You will lead a small, senior, fully remote squad (currently 7–8 people: Go and Python engineers, a deliverability engineer, an anti-spam engineer, and data analysis/annotation) and be accountable for what the team ships, how reliably it runs, and how the people on it grow.

This is a hands-on lead role, not a pure people-management role. Expect roughly 60% leadership (delivery, technical direction, coaching, incident command) and 40% hands-on engineering (design reviews, code review, spikes, production debugging). You are not expected to be the top individual contributor on the team — you are expected to be able to read every part of the system and hold a credible technical opinion about it.

You don't need to arrive as an email expert. If you have led engineers in an adjacent technical domain — infrastructure, networking, security, messaging, anti-abuse — and have a track record of getting deep into complex technical territory fast, we will teach you the email side.

The system you would inherit

• Inbound filtering: an Rspamd-based engine with a trained rule/ML model, released on a regular retraining cycle and measured on spam catch rate and false-positive rate.

• Outbound gateway: a Halon-based SMTP relay with per-domain warm-up ladders, rate limiting, quarantine, feedback-loop (ARF) processing, and a customer portal — Go services on bare metal.

• Panel integrations: cPanel/WHM, Plesk, DirectAdmin, plus Debian/Postfix deployments for large hosting partners.

• Data plane: Elasticsearch, Redis, Grafana dashboards and alerting, corpus and annotation pipelines feeding model training.

• Delivery: GitLab, Jenkins, Jira, weekly release cadence, blameless post-mortems within 24 hours.

What you will own

Delivery:

• Turn the product backlog into a credible, sequenced engineering plan — estimates, dependencies, and a release train the team actually hits.

• Run the team's weekly cadence: planning, release readiness, status reporting with real numbers rather than adjectives.

• Own engineering quality gates for model releases: no detection model ships without a measured catch rate and false-positive deltas against the previous model, and a rollback path.

• Keep technical debt visible and funded — negotiate it into the roadmap rather than absorbing it silently.

• Report delivery status and risk to engineering leadership weekly; every item carries an owner and a due date.

Technical direction:

• Own the architecture of the email stack together with the architecture group: review designs, write and approve ADRs, and make build-vs-buy calls with explicit trade-offs.

• Review code and designs on the critical path — mail flow, rate limiting, quarantine, authentication — and set the bar for tests, observability, and safe rollout.

• Own production health: SLOs, alerting, capacity, and the deliverability posture of our sending infrastructure (IP reputation, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, rDNS, RBL listings).

• Act as incident commander for product-impacting events: coordinate remediation across teams, keep partners informed, and author the post-mortem within 24 hours with named owners and dates.

People:

• Lead a distributed team across the globe: 1:1s, goal setting, performance reviews, and career development.

• Hire: define the profile, run technical interviews, onboard, and mentor engineers

• Set the working agreements that make async work — written decisions, public-by-default communication, durable artifacts over meetings.

AI-augmented engineering:

We evaluate engineers here partly on how effectively they work with coding agents. As the lead you are expected to model and coach this: prompt specificity, review quality on agent-generated code, tool-boundary awareness, context provision, iteration effectiveness, error recovery, and end-to-end task completion. The team has already scaffolded its repositories for agent-assisted development; extending that to the model and rule pipelines is live work.

Working with the Product Owner:

• The Product Owner sets priorities, owns partner commitments and the roadmap narrative. You own the plan to deliver them and the technical risk in doing so.

• Escalate scope-versus-capacity conflicts early and in writing, with at least two mitigation options.

First 90 days:

• 30 days: Own the release train and the weekly status; be able to trace an inbound message and an outbound message end to end through the stack; complete 1:1s with every team member and produce a written read on the team's strengths and gaps.

• 60 days: Own on-call and incident command for the product line; publish the current SLOs and the top three reliability risks with mitigations; land at least one non-trivial change yourself.

• 90 days: Present a technical roadmap for the email stack agreed with the PO and the architecture group, including a debt-paydown line item and a staffing recommendation.

Requirements

Must have:

• 5+ years as a software engineer, with 2+ years leading a team of engineers (team lead, tech lead with people responsibility, or engineering manager) in a product company.

• Strong hands-on Linux background; comfortable reading and reviewing production code in Go and/or Python, and debugging live systems on the box.

• Track record of shipping and operating a distributed backend service under real production load — you have carried a pager and run incidents.

• Experience mastering a complex technical domain quickly and making credible architectural decisions in it.

• Practical fluency with observability and data tooling to judge quality yourself, not via reports (Grafana, Kibana/Elasticsearch, Redash or equivalents).

• Demonstrated people leadership: 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring, and growing engineers.

• Experience working in an agentic / AI-assisted development workflow, or a clear appetite to lead one.

• Professional proficiency in English, written and spoken.

• Availability to work EU hours.

Nice to have:

• Working knowledge of email infrastructure: SMTP, SPF/DKIM/DMARC, rDNS, IP reputation and warm-up, RBLs, feedback loops.

• Experience with open-source mail stacks — Rspamd, SpamAssassin, Postfix, Exim, Halon — or the web hosting ecosystem (cPanel/WHM and other control panels).

• Exposure to the ML model lifecycle: training data quality, evaluation metrics, and the trade-offs in tuning detection systems.

• Experience running incident and escalation management with external partners.

Benefits

What's in it for you

• A focus on professional development

• Interesting and challenging projects

• Fully remote work with flexible working hours — schedule your day and work from any location worldwide

• Paid 24 days of vacation per year, 10 days of national holidays, and unlimited sick leave

• Compensation for private medical insurance

• Co-working and gym/sports reimbursement

• Budget for education

• The opportunity to receive a reward for the most innovative idea that the company can patent