Team Lead, Product Engineering (hands-on)

YGO.ai is a VC-funded AI tourism platform looking for a Team Lead for one of our product engineering pods: a hands-on engineer who uses AI to ship fast and acts as the face of their pod towards clients and leadership.

IMPORTANT: This is not a traditional coding role. You’ll use Claude Code and other AI tools to 10x your output, always thinking about how the product or feature you are working on benefits the user. Also: we have no QA team, you OWN the quality of what you ship!

About this role: every engineer at YGO already owns their work end-to-end (IC + DRI). Everyone in the pod is, in effect, their own architect and lead developer. So this role is not about being the strongest techie in the room or telling people how to build.

A Team Lead at YGO is the spokesperson, coordinator and facilitator for their pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients. You come from the management path, not the deep-specialist path: you have seen a lot as a developer and have consciously decided that enabling a team, working with clients and driving product outcomes is what energises you now, not coding all day.

You remain a hands-on engineer. Expect roughly 30-40% of your week on coordination, client and product work, and the rest as an individual contributor. This is not an HR-style people-management role: no performance reviews, no career coaching.

WHAT YOU’LL ACTUALLY DO:

• Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partners
• Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs
• Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod so nothing gets lost in translation
• Represent your pod in product planning sessions and bring a strong product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offs
• Help pod members with product decisions and prioritisation, enabling engineers who may be technically stronger than you
• Contribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code
• Join client meetings to align on requirements, report on delivery and keep the relationship professional and calm

OUR STACK:

• Backend: Go monorepo (no framework, 3+ services)
• Hosting: PaaS-managed containers, local setup fully mirrors production via Docker Compose
• Tools: Jaeger tracing, Betterstack (Logging, Alerting), Redis Asynq queue
• Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis
• AI tooling: Claude Code (mandatory)

YOU MUST HAVE:

• 2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit
• A developer’s background: you have seen production reality with your own hands before moving towards leading people
• A genuinely product-driven mindset: you think about user value and business outcomes before implementation
• Comfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authority
• Willingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of your pod
• Excellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates and client conversations
• Proven experience using Claude Code, share specific examples
• Solid Golang experience, you’ll review AI’s code and you must understand how it works
• Ability to do on-call once in a while to help maintain our platform’s reliability & uptime
• European or African timezones (plus/minus 3 hours from CET)
• Available full-time (40 hours/week)

This is a Contract position, Remote EU (Germany).

Apply here: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/ygo/c00dadf6-7c98-4d74-affa-ddc7acf5391f/application.