Tech Lead

About the job

Honu is looking for a Hands-on Tech Lead to join our small agile team and take a leadership role in delivering our cutting edge platform. We are looking for a top technologist with extensive experience in Python (7+ years professionally) who is a systems thinker, with a strong foundation in software engineering and software design.

You will work closely with our Founder, and will take the lead in design and development of our cutting-edge platform for AI-centric products.

The compensation for this role will be salary + stock options.

The Role

• Have a hugely visible impact, building towards our first public release and beyond, as a member of a small, tight-knit team, including working closely with the founder

• Architect and develop scalable solutions, that are reliable, secure and extensible.

• Lead and mentor the engineering team. Improve engineering standards, tooling, and processes

• Drive innovation and strategic technical decisions

• Advise leadership and the product on key technical considerations related to the rapid developments in tech

• Ensure high-quality code and best practices. Write clean, maintainable and efficient code and ensure code quality through TDD and observability practices

• Develop RESTful APIs using FastAPI and Pydantic

• Work with SQL and NoSQL databases, as well as ORM tools like SQLAlchemy and SQLModel

• Containerise applications using Docker

• Participate in Agile XP methodologies like pair programming and code reviews

• Deploy applications to Google Cloud Platform using Terraform

• Monitoring and supporting production, staging, research, and demo environments

Ideal Profile

• Many years of experience in building complex software solutions, better if in a product company, while armed with a healthy dose of practical skepticism and pragmatism

• Believer in easy-to-maintain code and identify with modern concepts such as clean coding, automated testing and continuous deployment

• Driven and passionate about building innovative technologies, and able to rally the team around them

• Strong systems thinker, able to see the bigger picture at different resolutions simultaneously

• You know start-up life, ideally within a PaaS business

• You’ve shipped high-quality products from start to finish and are equally as comfortable building from scratch as you are improving an existing product

• Strong background in system architecture and design.

• You possess extensive technical proficiency in Python (7+ years professionally) and are comfortable with a range of libraries and, ideally, cloud-based architecture (AWS/GCP/Azure etc), we use Terraform to deploy to GCP)

• Excellent problem-solving and communication skills

• You’re considerate, humble, and a strong believer in teamwork

• You're comfortable taking ownership, accountability and responsibility

• Experience with the latest agentic frameworks ( e.g. langchain, llamaindex ) and protocols like MCP.

• Experience using AI-augmented ecosystem for development like Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code.

• Based in the UK or Europe

Nice to haves

• Experience with OAuth/API user credential handling

• Experience with 3rd-party API integrations

• Some front end experience using Next.Js/Typescript/React