Job Description
We are seeking a hands-on Lead, Product Engineering with a strong product mindset to lead the development and evolution of consumer-facing digital products.
This role requires deep technical expertise, leadership capability, and ownership across the full stack—application and infrastructure. The ideal candidate has built and scaled real-world consumer products, demonstrates strong engineering judgment, and is comfortable challenging product requirements to deliver better solutions.
This is a hands-on leadership role requiring active involvement in architecture, coding, and engineering practices—not just team management.
Responsibilities:
- Lead end-to-end product engineering for consumer-facing and backend systems
- Take ownership of existing platforms and drive improvements in scalability, reliability, and performance
- Contribute hands-on to application development, architecture design, and infrastructure (cloud & IaC)
- Define and enforce coding standards, design principles, and engineering best practices
- Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Business teams to refine requirements and challenge assumptions
- Build, mentor, and manage high-performing engineering teams
- Drive adoption of cloud-native architectures, DevSecOps, and automation-first practices
- Ensure systems meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements (especially in a banking environment)
- Own architectural decision-making and drive long-term platform scalability, resilience, and engineering strategy
- Ensure production stability, operational excellence, and incident ownership for critical systems
AI-Augmented Engineering & Vibe Coding Culture
At HugoBank, we recognize that AI-assisted development is now a core part of modern engineering workflows.
We support the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, and Claude to enhance productivity, accelerate development, and improve developer experience.
However, we emphasize that:
- AI tools are accelerators, not substitutes for engineering thinking
- Engineers must fully understand, validate, and own all generated code
- Strong fundamentals in system design, debugging, and problem-solving remain essential
As a Lead, you will:
- Define best practices for responsible AI-assisted development
- Guide teams on effective and secure use of AI tools
- Ensure AI improves quality, maintainability, and security—not just speed
- Build a culture of AI-augmented engineering with strong ownership and accountability
Team Development & Engineering Culture
The Lead, Product Engineering will help shape a high-performing engineering organization by:
- AI-Augmented Engineering: Promote responsible AI usage with clear guardrails, ensuring validation, security compliance, and avoidance of blind copy-paste development
- Engineering Fundamentals: Strengthen system design, distributed systems, data structures, and debugging skills while balancing AI-driven speed with engineering depth
- Engineering Standards: Drive clean code practices, robust testing, CI/CD maturity, and structured design thinking
- Mentorship & Growth: Develop engineers across all levels in cloud-native development, microservices, DevSecOps, and AI-assisted workflows
- Ownership Culture: Foster end-to-end ownership, production accountability, and continuous improvement mindset
Requirements
- Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
- 12–15+ years of experience in software/product engineering
- 3–5+ years of experience in a leadership role
- Proven experience in building and scaling consumer-facing digital products
- Strong hands-on experience in modern programming languages (Java, Kotlin, Node.js, Python, Go)
- Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and cloud-native architectures
- Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
- Experience with microservices, APIs, and distributed systems
- Strong understanding of secure coding and cloud security principles
- Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, and release management
- Demonstrated ability to lead teams while remaining technically hands-on
- Strong problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in fintech, digital banking, or regulated environments
- Exposure to high-scale, high-availability systems
- Familiarity with compliance, security, and data protection requirements
