Tech Lead (Python / API Squad)
SourceThe team waiting for you:
Our API Squad owns the public and internal APIs that give customers access to Datasets Products' extensive B2B dataset of company, employee and job records. You’ll join a small team of three Python developers as its dedicated Tech Lead, staying hands-on with code while guiding architecture decisions and mentoring engineers — without direct reports. The platform is evolving quickly as we rebuild our billing and credits system, scale event-driven data delivery and develop new ways to package our data. Your challenge will be to keep our high-traffic APIs reliable as they grow, establish clear technical ownership and help the team build systems it can confidently maintain together.
In this role, you will:
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Design and build production Python services behind our high-traffic public and internal APIs, contributing code whenever the team needs it.
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Lead architecture decisions and design reviews across the API platform, including API gateways, authentication, search and real-time data services.
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Improve API reliability and operability through testing, monitoring, alerting and incident follow-ups, while strengthening development workflows, CI/CD and automation.
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Work with Product and neighbouring engineering squads to define technical interfaces, agree on standards and make pragmatic architectural trade-offs.
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Build shared ownership of services through knowledge sharing and clear documentation, ensuring critical systems can be operated and supported by more than one engineer.
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Mentor developers through code reviews, pairing and design feedback, balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability.
Your skills & experiences:
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5+ years of professional Python backend development experience.
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Experience designing and operating high-traffic REST APIs, including API versioning, backward compatibility and production incident response.
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Experience working with relational and search databases, such as PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, including query performance optimisation.
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Experience leading technical decisions, mentoring engineers and facilitating design reviews — with or without a formal leadership title.
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Clear communication, pragmatic problem-solving and the ability to navigate changing priorities and collaborate across teams.
Nice to have:
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Experience with API gateways.
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Experience with message queues and asynchronous workers, such as RabbitMQ or Celery.
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Familiarity with exposing data APIs to AI agents through MCP, tool calling or similar approaches.
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Familiarity with a second programming language.
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Experience operating services with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability tools such as GitLab CI, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or Sentry.
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Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including idempotency, retries and eventual consistency.
Tech stack:
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Language & framework: Python, FastAPI
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APIs & gateway: REST, Kong
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Databases & search: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Elasticsearch
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Caching: Redis, Dragonfly
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Messaging & event streaming: RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redpanda
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Infrastructure & deployment: Docker, Kubernetes
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CI/CD: GitLab CI
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Monitoring & observability: Grafana, OpenTelemetry (OTel), Sentry
Salary & Benefits:
- Gross salary: 5500 - 7500 EUR/month. Keep in mind that we are open to discuss a different salary based on your skills and competencies.
- Growth & Learning: 40+ internal learning options, external conferences, mentorship, and year-round knowledge-sharing.
- Health & Well-being: Private health insurance, psychotherapy, on-site well-being consultants, 24/7 gym access, and a wellness app.Celebration & Community: Team events, an overseas workation, quarterly team-building budgets, and plenty of ways to mark milestones together.
- Plus bonus vacation days, paid life-moment days off, barista coffee, and all the tools you need. See the full list of benefits here: https://source.ai/career/blog/benefits