Senior Technical Lead

About the role:

We are looking for a Senior Technical Lead responsible for Thought Spot’s data platform team, our flagship interactive analytics experience.

The Data Platform team owns how Thought Spot connects to, manages, and queries data across Snowflake, Big Query, Redshift, Databricks, and other external systems. In this role, you will define the technical roadmap, guide architecture, mentor engineers, and ensure delivery of a scalable, reliable, and high-performance platform used by thousands of enterprise customers.
This is a hands-on leadership role: ~60% technical contribution (architecture, design reviews, prototyping, performance tuning) and ~40% people leadership (coaching, execution, quality, cross-functional collaboration)

What you'll do:

Technical Leadership

Provide architectural vision, strong technical direction, and hands-on guidance to engineering teams.
Drive modernisation of existing systems, including multi-tenant architecture, cloud-native deployments, containerisation, and Kubernetes-based scaling.
Foster best practices in microservices design, distributed systems, API development, and backend performance optimisation.
Lead high-impact initiatives across reliability, security, scalability, and observability.

Execution & Delivery

Lead a team of engineers in delivering capabilities across multiple releases with predictable, high-quality execution.
Break down ambiguous feature requirements into technical plans, milestones, and deliverable work-streams.
Improve iteration velocity through better tooling, CI/CD, testing automation, and standardisation.
Work closely with SRE to ensure smooth releases, on-call quality, incident analysis, and reliability improvements.

People Leadership

Mentor, coach, and grow engineers; support career development through feedback, performance discussions, and empowerment.
Create a high-performing engineering culture anchored on ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement.
Partner with cross-functional leaders (Product, Design, QA, SRE, Customer Success) to align priorities and remove execution blockers.

What you'll bring:

12+ years of software engineering experience, including 2–4 years in a technical leadership or engineering management role.
Strong expertise in Java, distributed systems, microservices architecture, cloud-native development, and container/Kubernetes orchestration.
Deep experience building complex data/analytics products or consumer-grade interactive applications.
Ability to lead architecture discussions, make sound technical decisions, and balance short-term delivery with long-term platform scalability.
Proven track record of mentoring engineers, driving execution, and leading teams through technically complex initiatives.

Experience with data platforms, analytics engines, query execution systems, or real-time connectors.
Exposure to cloud security, identity systems (OAuth, SSO, IDP integrations), and tenant isolation models.
Experience working with gRPC/Thrift APIs, high-performance threading models, or asynchronous queue-based architectures.
Familiarity with AI/ML-driven productivity tooling or agentic engineering workflows.
Prior experience working in high-growth SaaS or enterprise product companies.

Good to have skills:

Exposure to modern data platforms and cloud data warehouses (CDWs) such as Snowflake, Databricks, or Google Big Query.
Strong DBMS fundamentals, including query optimisation, indexing strategies, and database performance tuning.
Strong SQL proficiency with experience designing and working with large-scale analytical datasets.
Exposure to BI tools.