Team Lead, AI Product Engineering
- Role
- Engineering Management
- Experience
- Lead
- Employment
- Contract
- Company size
- Startup
Open to DE only · UTC-2…UTC+4. Set where you work from to check your eligibility.
No BS summary
Hands-on engineering team lead for an AI tourism product pod, with 2-3+ years leading a team/squad/pod and a production developer background. Must have solid Golang, proven Claude Code experience, excellent English, full-time availability, and be in European or African timezones within ±3 hours of CET.
Core skills
Required languages
YGO.ai is a VC-funded AI tourism platform looking for a Team Lead for one of our product engineering pods: a hands-on engineer who uses AI to ship fast and acts as the face of their pod towards clients and leadership.
⚠️IMPORTANT: This is not a traditional coding role. You'll use Claude Code and other AI tools to 10x your output, always thinking about how the product or feature you are working on benefits the user. Also: we have no QA team, you OWN the quality of what you ship!
🧭About this role: every engineer at YGO already owns their work end-to-end (IC + DRI). Everyone in the pod is, in effect, their own architect and lead developer. So this role is not about being the strongest techie in the room or telling people how to build.
A Team Lead at YGO is the spokesperson, coordinator and facilitator for their pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients. You come from the management path, not the deep-specialist path: you have seen a lot as a developer and have consciously decided that enabling a team, working with clients and driving product outcomes is what energises you now, not coding all day.
You remain a hands-on engineer. Expect roughly 30-40% of your week on coordination, client and product work, and the rest as an individual contributor. This is not an HR-style people-management role: no performance reviews, no career coaching. As we scale, light one-on-ones and check-ins may become part of it, but the job is coordination and delivery, not administration.
🧑💻 What you'll actually do:
- Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partners
- Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs (lightweight project management, we deliberately have no project managers)
- Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod so nothing gets lost in translation
- Represent your pod in product planning sessions and bring a strong product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offs
- Help pod members with product decisions and prioritisation, enabling engineers who may be technically stronger than you
- Contribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, review AI output for quality and architectural fit
- Join client meetings to align on requirements, report on delivery and keep the relationship professional and calm
📚 Our stack:
- Backend: Go monorepo (no framework, 3+ services)
- Hosting: PaaS-managed containers, local setup fully mirrors production via Docker Compose
- Tools: Jaeger tracing, Betterstack (Logging, Alerting), Redis Asynq queue
- Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis
- AI tooling: Claude Code (mandatory)
🚢 Products you will lead a pod on:
- An AI search & recommendation engine for major travel enterprises: heavy client integration work (SSO, security reviews, GDS integrations) with demanding enterprise customers
- A content enrichment API: high-scale, data- and AI-focused backend work
- Partner and supplier integrations, data ingestion pipelines, LLM providers
✅ You must have:
- 2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit (a hard must, think team lead or early-stage engineering manager)
- A developer's background: you have seen production reality with your own hands before moving towards leading people
- A genuinely product-driven mindset: you think about user value and business outcomes before implementation
- Comfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authority
- Willingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of your pod
- Excellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates and client conversations
- Ownership mentality with a strive for elegantly simple, high-quality solutions; you test your own work thoroughly since we have no QA team
- Proven experience using Claude Code, share specific examples
- Solid Golang experience, you'll review AI's code and you must understand how it works
- Ability to do on-call once in a while to help maintain our platform's reliability & uptime
- ⚠️ European or African timezones (±3 hours from CET)
- Available full-time (40 hours/week)
❤️ You are a great fit if you:
- Made the classic developer's fork-in-the-road decision, lifelong engineer or leading people, and chose people, clients and product
- Are energised by product planning sessions and have opinions about what the pod should build next, not just how
- Are comfortable being the face of your pod, in internal planning rooms and on calls with enterprise clients
- Enjoy enabling engineers who are technically stronger than you
- Ship fast but always verify it actually works; think "how can AI build this?" as your first instinct
- Get frustrated when development takes weeks instead of days
‼️Things to consider before applying that won't be a match:
- This would be your first leadership role
- You see the lead as the chief architect who makes the technical decisions for the team
- You are looking for an HR-focused people-management role built around performance reviews and career coaching
- You want to lead a team without staying hands-on in the codebase
- You would rather not take part in client meetings or stakeholder-facing conversations
- You prefer to focus on execution and leave product planning to others
- You rely on formal authority to get a team moving
- You have never used Claude Code or similar AI coding tools
- You are outside European/African timezones
What you'll do
- Be the spokesperson for the pod internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partners.
- Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs.
- Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod.
- Represent the pod in product planning sessions and bring a product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offs.
- Help pod members with product decisions and prioritisation.
- Contribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, and review AI output for quality and architectural fit.
- Join client meetings to align on requirements, report on delivery, and keep the relationship professional and calm.
- Lead a pod working on an AI search and recommendation engine for major travel enterprises, including client integration work such as SSO, security reviews, and GDS integrations.
- Lead a pod working on a content enrichment API with high-scale, data- and AI-focused backend work.
- Lead work on partner and supplier integrations, data ingestion pipelines, and LLM providers.
- Spend roughly 30-40% of the week on coordination, client, and product work, and the rest as an individual contributor.
- Take ownership of the quality of shipped work because there is no QA team.
- Do on-call once in a while to help maintain platform reliability and uptime.
What they require
- 2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit.
- Developer background with hands-on production experience before moving toward leading people.
- Product-driven mindset focused on user value and business outcomes before implementation.
- Comfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authority.
- Willingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of the pod.
- Excellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates, and client conversations.
- Ownership mentality with a drive for elegantly simple, high-quality solutions.
- Ability to test your own work thoroughly because there is no QA team.
- Proven experience using Claude Code, with specific examples.
- Solid Golang experience and ability to review AI-generated code and understand how it works.
- Ability to do on-call once in a while to help maintain platform reliability and uptime.
- European or African timezones within ±3 hours from CET.
- Available full-time, 40 hours/week.
- Fit: chose people, clients, and product over a lifelong individual-contributor engineering path.
- Fit: energized by product planning sessions and opinionated about what the pod should build next.
- Fit: comfortable being the face of the pod in internal planning rooms and on calls with enterprise clients.
- Fit: enjoys enabling engineers who may be technically stronger.
- Fit: ships fast but verifies that the work actually works.
- Fit: thinks about how AI can build something as a first instinct.
- Fit: gets frustrated when development takes weeks instead of days.
- Not a match if this would be the candidate's first leadership role.
- Not a match if the candidate sees the lead as the chief architect who makes technical decisions for the team.
- Not a match if the candidate wants an HR-focused people-management role centered on performance reviews and career coaching.
- Not a match if the candidate wants to lead a team without staying hands-on in the codebase.
- Not a match if the candidate does not want to take part in client meetings or stakeholder-facing conversations.
- Not a match if the candidate prefers to focus on execution and leave product planning to others.
- Not a match if the candidate relies on formal authority to get a team moving.
- Not a match if the candidate has never used Claude Code or similar AI coding tools.
- Not a match if the candidate is outside European/African timezones.
YGO develops AI infrastructure for the travel industry. Its modular AI platform includes AI Search, Recommendations, Packaging, Content Automation, Customer Service, and AI Assistant Integration for travel companies.