Engineering Lead - Counterpart

The Role

As an Engineering Lead at Counterpart, you are the architect and tech lead for a specific domain, such as the claims system, underwriting platform, or infrastructure layer. You are responsible for systems that are tightly coupled and require a single person to maintain their integrity. You understand how your systems function, how they should evolve, and where potential failures lie, owning their technical vision.

During planning, you collaborate with a Technical Product Manager to break down initiatives into projects and define high-level technical requirements. You consult with other Engineering Leads to identify similar solutions and promote reuse before finalizing an approach. During execution, you conduct the technical review for each project, then allow the project team to build, stepping in when architectural questions arise.

You work with other Engineering Leads to establish and uphold Counterpart's technical standards. You are also an active engineer, contributing to builds and capable of leading projects yourself.

People management is optional in this role. While some Engineering Leads may manage a few engineers, most do not. Your leadership primarily stems from your technical vision, adherence to standards, and the quality of your own work, rather than your position in the organizational chart.

You Will

Own the Technical Vision for Your Systems

• Understand the direction of each system in your domain, their interdependencies, and where explicit boundaries and data contracts are necessary.
• Maintain architectural integrity, preventing redundant systems, advocating for reuse and consolidation, and declining paths that lead to long-term sprawl.
• Consult with other Engineering Leads before finalizing technical approaches to ensure alignment and prevent conflicts across domains. This is a lightweight, peer-to-peer collaboration.
• Make deliberate decisions regarding technical debt within your domain, knowing when to accumulate, pay down, or refactor, and communicating trade-offs to your Technical Product Manager and the VP of Engineering.
• Manage the context architecture for your domain, keeping documentation, design patterns, and domain knowledge current to enable engineers to operate systems without relying on tribal knowledge.

Plan the Work

• Partner with your Technical Product Manager during planning to transform business problems into initiatives and projects. You will write high-level technical requirements, covering system approach, scalability, security, and integration considerations.
• Collaborate with your Technical Product Manager to assign rough t-shirt sizes (multi-month or single month) to projects, defining monthly deliverables for multi-month projects.
• Advise the VP of Engineering on Project Lead assignments, leveraging your knowledge of engineers' capabilities.

Review Through Reviews

• Conduct technical reviews for each funded project in your domain. The Project Lead will present requirements and approach, and you will confirm alignment with systems and standards, and identify potential unseen problems before development begins.
• For projects spanning multiple domains, involve the relevant Engineering Leads in a single, comprehensive technical review.
• Provide architectural guidance to project teams during the build phase, otherwise maintaining a hands-off approach to day-to-day activities.

Set and Maintain Technical Standards

• Collaborate with other Engineering Leads to produce and maintain Counterpart's shared technical standards, ensuring they are current, specific, and enforceable.
• Enforce these standards within your domain, identifying and correcting deviations early.
• Contribute to decisions on AI tooling and development practices, as Engineering Leads collectively determine AI tool usage across the engineering organization.

Build

• Write code and build systems when your deep expertise is required, tackling the most challenging problems in your domain rather than delegating everything.
• Assume the Project Lead role when a project demands it, taking responsibility for refining requirements, conducting reviews, breaking down tickets, delegating tasks, engaging stakeholders, and iterating.
• Stay current with AI development, evaluating emerging frameworks, tools, and practices against Counterpart's systems and sharing insights with other Engineering Leads.
• Review production incidents in your domain, identifying architectural gaps as root causes and addressing the architecture itself, not just the symptoms.

Mentor

• Mentor engineers in your domain, using reviews and architectural discussions as teaching opportunities to elevate their system design thinking.
• Coach Project Leads through complex technical decisions, helping them understand trade-offs while empowering them to own execution.

You Have

• Extensive experience designing, building, and operating complex software systems, including both creating new systems and maintaining inherited ones.
• The ability to seamlessly transition between architect and individual contributor roles, applying the appropriate approach as needed.
• Proven experience reviewing technical work from other engineers, leading to clear decisions rather than debates, and providing well-reasoned approvals or rejections.
• Proficiency with Python, Django, Amazon Web Services (AWS), React, and PostgreSQL.
• Proficiency in developing with AI tools (e.g., Claude Code, Cursor) and a commitment to staying updated on evolving AI development practices.
• Experience guiding technical direction across teams without direct management authority, influencing through architecture, reviews, and the quality of your contributions.
• Curiosity about the insurance domain, enabling you to understand the business context supported by your systems.
• Excellent communication skills, capable of translating technical complexity for engineering, product, and business stakeholders without losing meaning.
• Low ego and high Emotional Quotient (EQ), allowing you to influence without authority, accept feedback gracefully, and prioritize technical decisions over personal ego.
• Experience working effectively with distributed, remote teams.