Lead Developer

You'll lead a team of FDEs on client projects, working alongside AI transformation leads. You own high-complexity projects end-to-end - product design, technical architecture, trade-offs, and delivery. The problems are messy. The timelines are aggressive. You figure it out. You're deeply embedded in client work. But you also bring back learnings, patterns, and insights that shape the platform we're building. You spend your days figuring out how to use AI agents and coding assistants to make your whole team faster.
Responsibilities:
Lead client engagements - drive delivery and raise the bar on what your team ships.
Partner with AI transformation leads to delivering software that moves client metrics.
Work with customers, consultants, and cross-functional teams to build relationships, deliver software, and spot what comes next.
Operate in cockpit mode. You steer. Your agents execute. Claude, Code, Codex, and others write code, run tests, open PRs, update tickets, and read and prioritise your email - GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, Ashby, calendar, all of it. You engage with these systems through your agents, not around them. And you set that standard for your team.
Break hard engineering problems into shippable pieces and get them out the door.
Make smart trade-offs between elegant code and shipping fast.
Unblock your team. Remove obstacles that slow delivery.
Build AI-powered solutions - LLMs, agents, and automation. Whatever the client needs.
Feed learnings back to the platform - what worked, what broke, what to build next.
Help build the team by mentoring engineers and spotting people who can operate at this speed.
Requirements:
7-10 years of software engineering experience.
You've led a team of IC makers - dev, QA, design, PM, BA, whatever the function - and kept them shipping.
Experience building applications from scratch - language and paradigm don't matter, but discipline and craft do.
Experience solving 0-to-1 problems - identifying product-market fit, iterating with users, and shipping.
Technical Skills:
Strong software engineering fundamentals and architectural judgement.
Hands-on across the full stack - front-end, back-end, data pipelines, and AI models.
You understand how businesses make money with software.
Leadership and Communication:
You lead from the code. Your team sees it.
Experience mentoring engineers and growing a team.
You can explain technical trade-offs clearly to engineers, clients, and operators.
Mindset:
Comfort working without a map in ambiguous environments.
Grit. You don't wait for perfect clarity to make progress.
You're comfortable in a terminal. Not a shell wizard - but you live in one, and it doesn't faze you.
At Realfast, everyone codes - just like everyone communicates. You're already building small apps, scripts, or tools to make your own life better. Here you take that all the way.
You already spend hours every day using AI coding assistants - Claude Code, Codex, or the equivalent. If you don't, the pace here will feel alien.
Git is how we collaborate - not just engineers, everyone. You don't need to walk in fluently, but you need to be comfortable learning fast.
Clear, precise prose. You can reason through a problem in writing, explain your thinking to a colleague, and direct an AI agent with the same clarity. The quality of your reasoning on paper directly determines the quality of your output.
Backgrounds we'd consider:
Engineering lead or tech lead at a startup or product company who's kept a team of IC makers shipping while still writing code every day and who's had exposure to design, sales, or client delivery alongside the engineering.
Senior developer who's led a cross-functional delivery team (dev, QA, design, and BA) and elevated the craft of everyone on it, not by managing but by setting the standard with their own work.
Full-stack engineer who's moved into a player-coach role, owns client relationships as well as technical outcomes, and has strong opinions about quality that come from having built and shipped across disciplines.
An engineering manager who never stopped being a developer, someone whose team ships at a high bar because they pair, review, and architect alongside their people, not from a distance.
Lead at a consultancy or agency who's run delivery on ambiguous, high-stakes engagements and brings craft discipline to fast-moving, client-facing work; bonus if they've also done design thinking, pre-sales, or solution architecture.
Other equivalent roles where you've led IC craftspeople, stayed hands-on, and brought breadth beyond pure engineering design sensibility, commercial awareness, or both.

Experience
6-10 yrs