Lead Engineer - AI-Native Email App

About Us

BJAK was founded in 2019 with the mission to provide smarter ways for people to plan, save, and grow their money. We built the first mobile-first insurance platform in Southeast Asia, making insurance accessible online to millions in the region. Today, we are the leading insurance platform in Southeast Asia and are expanding to help people with spending, saving, investing, exchanging, traveling, and more. Our mission is to help people get more from their money every day.

We have a globally distributed team of over 20 nationalities who are passionate about their work. We look for talented, driven individuals who work for passion, not hours—people who love building next-generation products and redefining financial applications for everyone.

About the Role

We are looking for a Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of complex products and systems and raise the engineering bar across the team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role where you will design systems, write and review code, solve difficult engineering problems, guide other engineers, and drive major initiatives from idea to production. You should be comfortable moving between architecture and implementation, making strong technical decisions while remaining close to the code.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and execution of major products, features, and engineering initiatives.
• Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable systems across backend, frontend, APIs, databases, and infrastructure.
• Stay hands-on with engineering through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging, and production problem-solving.
• Make architecture decisions and technical trade-offs that balance speed, scalability, reliability, and maintainability.
• Break ambiguous product and technical problems into clear engineering solutions and execution plans.
• Set a high bar for code quality, system design, testing, security, observability, and production reliability.
• Review technical designs and code from other engineers and provide clear, actionable feedback.
• Mentor engineers and help strengthen technical capability across the team.
• Identify technical risks, bottlenecks, and architectural weaknesses before they become larger problems.
• Work closely with engineering, product, design, and AI teams to ship high-quality products quickly.
• Improve engineering tooling, development practices, and automation to increase team velocity.
• Own systems beyond release—monitor production, investigate incidents, resolve root causes, and continuously improve reliability.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering background with significant experience building and shipping production systems.
• Deep technical expertise in one or more areas such as backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs, databases, or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong system design and architecture skills with experience making technical decisions for complex or high-scale systems.
• Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.
• Proven experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to other engineers.
• Comfortable reviewing code, debugging complex issues, and working directly with production systems.
• Able to explain complex technical decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams.
• Strong product sense and ability to connect technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Able to work fast with ambiguity and take ownership from problem definition through production.
• Strong judgment around when to move quickly, when to simplify, and when deeper engineering investment is required.

What This Role Is Not For

• Engineers who want a leadership title but no longer want to write or review code.
• People who only want to work within one narrow technical area.
• Engineers who wait for complete specifications before starting.
• Candidates who over-engineer solutions when a simpler approach would achieve the outcome.
• Engineers who focus only on implementation without understanding the product or business problem.
• People who avoid production incidents, difficult debugging, or ownership after release.
• Candidates who make vague claims about technical leadership without being able to explain what they personally designed, built, shipped, or scaled.

The Bar

We are looking for technical leaders with real engineering career highlights. A strong highlight means you personally designed, built, shipped, or scaled a serious product, platform, or system and can go deep into the technical decisions behind it. You should demonstrate both technical depth and technical leadership—someone who can solve difficult engineering problems personally while making the engineers around them stronger.

Location

This is a remote role. We hire globally and work across multiple countries and time zones. Candidates should be comfortable working effectively in a distributed, fast-moving international team and collaborating with colleagues across different locations.

Language

English is our main working language across global teams. Strong English communication is required.

Interview Process

Our process is designed to move fast:

• Online assessment or practical task
• Technical interview
• CEO / final round

For strong candidates, we aim to complete the process and make an offer within 1 week from the start of the interview process. Candidates who complete assessments quickly will be prioritized.