🇩🇪 Berlin, Germany · 3h ago
Team Lead, AI Product Engineering
YGO
LinkedInleadEnglish-friendly
**Please note, this role is available remotely in Europe and African timezones**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. As we scale, light one-on-ones and check-ins may become part of it, but the job is coordination and delivery, not administration.🧑 💻 What you'll actually do:Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partnersCoordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs (lightweight project management, we deliberately have no project managers)Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod so nothing gets lost in translationRepresent your pod in product planning sessions and bring a strong product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offsHelp pod members with product decisions and prioritisation, enabling engineers who may be technically stronger than youContribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, review AI output for quality and architectural fitJoin 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 ComposeTools: Jaeger tracing, Betterstack (Logging, Alerting), Redis Asynq queueDatabases: PostgreSQL, RedisAI tooling: Claude Code (mandatory)🚢 Products you will lead a pod on:An AI search & recommendation engine for major travel enterprises: heavy client integration work (SSO, security reviews, GDS integrations) with demanding enterprise customersA content enrichment API: high-scale, data- and AI-focused backend workPartner and supplier integrations, data ingestion pipelines, LLM providers✅ You must have:2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit (a hard must, think team lead or early-stage engineering manager)A developer's background: you have seen production reality with your own hands before moving towards leading peopleA genuinely product-driven mindset: you think about user value and business outcomes before implementationComfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authorityWillingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of your podExcellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates and client conversationsOwnership mentality with a strive for elegantly simple, high-quality solutions; you test your own work thoroughly since we have no QA teamProven experience using Claude Code, share specific examplesSolid Golang experience, you'll review AI's code and you must understand how it worksAbility to do on-call once in a while to help maintain our platform's reliability & uptime⚠️ European or African timezones (±3 hours from CET)Available full-time (40 hours/week)❤️ You are a great fit if you:Made the classic developer's fork-in-the-road decision, lifelong engineer or leading people, and chose people, clients and productAre energised by product planning sessions and have opinions about what the pod should build next, not just howAre comfortable being the face of your pod, in internal planning rooms and on calls with enterprise clientsEnjoy enabling engineers who are technically stronger than youShip fast but always verify it actually works; think "how can AI build this?" as your first instinctGet frustrated when development takes weeks instead of days‼️Things to consider before applying that won't be a match:This would be your first leadership roleYou see the lead as the chief architect who makes the technical decisions for the teamYou are looking for an HR-focused people-management role built around performance reviews and career coachingYou want to lead a team without staying hands-on in the codebaseYou would rather not take part in client meetings or stakeholder-facing conversationsYou prefer to focus on execution and leave product planning to othersYou rely on formal authority to get a team movingYou have never used Claude Code or similar AI coding toolsYou are outside European/African timezonesSourced from LinkedIn. 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