In this role, you will act as a technical anchor for your team, solving ambiguous problems, guiding less experienced engineers, and actively shaping our technical and product roadmaps. This is a role for an engineer who values clean, maintainable systems, embraces an egoless approach to collaboration, and is driven to deliver robust solutions to production.
WHAT YOU’LL DO
Technical Leadership
Design & Build: Design and build highly reliable, secure, and scalable software solutions for complex problems.
Architecture & Standards: Contribute to team guidelines ensuring our services meet top-tier security, performance, cost, and reliability standards.
Code Quality & Peer Review: Set a high bar for code quality by providing constructive, detailed feedback on design documents and pull requests.
Operational Excellence: Investigate issues across multiple services in production, drive learning from operational incidents, and feed improvements back into our prioritisation process.
Hiring: Actively participate in our growth by leading technical interviews.
Product & Delivery
End-to-End Ownership: Own work items from initial concept to production, creating structured delivery plans, managing dependencies along the way and owning delivery of these work items.
Product Vision: Partner with Product Managers to prioritize features, translate client requirements into technical specifications, and ensure solutions align with our overarching product vision.
Incident Management: Confidently own the resolution of incidents, coordinating mitigation, fixes, and post-mortem artifacts.
Collaboration & Mentorship
Team Growth: Mentor and support less experienced engineers, helping them level up technically and adapt to Thought Machine’s engineering philosophy.
Stakeholder Management: Translate highly technical problems and architectural decisions into clear concepts for non-technical stakeholders.
WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR
Technical Expertise: Strong proficiency in modern backend languages (ideally Go or Python) and experience building distributed, cloud-native systems (Kubernetes, AWS/GCP, gRPC, PostgreSQL).
Problem Solving: A proven track record of breaking down ambiguous, and complex problems into clear, deliverable milestones.
Production Operations: Experience supporting high-throughput systems in production environments and diagnosing complex issues across distributed systems.
Egoless Collaboration: A highly collaborative, feedback-receptive mindset focused on finding the best outcomes for our clients and business rather than defending personal preferences.
Communication: Excellent written and verbal communication skills, with the ability to build consensus and document technical designs clearly.
This is a full-time, permanent position based in our Lisbon office, requiring Three days a week onsite.
Benefits
Highly competitive salary
Voluntary Pension Plan (match up to 5%)
Private Healthcare Insurance
Comprehensive Life Insurance
25 days holiday plus public holidays
Two charity days a year
Daily Meal Allowance
Access to outstanding learning materials and courses
Sports and hobby clubs, subsidised by Thought Machine
All the latest tech you need
Huge range of healthy (and not-so-healthy) snacks, smoothies and drinks
A talented and experienced team as your colleagues
An environment where we encourage learning and progress
We actively hire candidates who demonstrate technical excellence in their field and welcome people of all ages and backgrounds, providing everyone with equal access to professional development. You are encouraged to apply even if your experience doesn't accurately match the job description. We also encourage applications from those with different abilities, including candidates with ADHD, autism, dyslexia or dyspraxia.
