Technical Lead

Job Title: Technical Lead Location: Plano, TX (Onsite) Long Term Contract We are looking for a Technical Lead to join our Enterprise Technology division and take clear ownership of engineering delivery across a cross-functional team. This is a leadership role in the fullest sense — you will be accountable for the technical direction, quality, and output of the team while remaining hands-on with code. The work spans legacy modernisation, new feature development, portal and application builds, and data and reporting capabilities. You will work closely with product stakeholders (Internal) to understand requirements and translate them into sound technical solutions, but your primary focus is on leading your engineers and ensuring the team delivers with consistency and confidence. If you are someone who takes pride in the work your team produces, invests in the people around you, and thrives when there is real complexity to navigate, this role is worth a close look. KEY RESPONSIBILITIES Team Leadership & Delivery • Lead the engineering team day to day — setting direction, unblocking individuals, reviewing work in progress, and maintaining a clear picture of where delivery stands at any point. • Take accountability for the team's technical output, ensuring that what gets built is well-designed, properly tested, and fit for a production environment that serves a significant customer base. • Run or contribute to sprint ceremonies with a focus on technical readiness — making sure the team goes into each sprint with stories that are well understood, appropriately broken down, and technically sound before work begins. • Manage technical dependencies across workstreams, identifying risks early and working across teams to resolve them before they become delivery blockers. • Communicate delivery status and technical risks clearly to engineering leadership and business stakeholders, giving an honest and accurate picture at all times. • Collaborate with business and product stakeholders to understand requirements, challenge assumptions where needed, and ensure the team is always building the right thing in the right way. Legacy Modernisation • Lead the assessment and incremental modernisation of legacy platforms, including decomposing monolithic applications into well-defined, independently deployable services. • Define and drive re-platforming strategies that allow the organisation to retire technical debt progressively without disrupting live customer and dealer-facing services. • Champion API-first and event-driven design patterns as legacy point-to-point integrations are replaced over time. • Manage the migration of applicable workloads to cloud environments, contributing to architecture decisions and working with infrastructure teams to execute safely. • Maintain a clear and current view of technical debt across the platforms you own — quantifying it, communicating it, and making sure it is treated as a first-class concern in planning conversations. New Enhancements & Feature Delivery • Own technical delivery end to end for new product enhancements — from initial design through to production release — across TFS's platform portfolio spanning customer channels, dealer integrations, and back-office financial systems. • Translate business requirements into detailed technical designs, making architecture and implementation decisions that the team can build from with confidence. • Ensure new capabilities are engineered to scale, with appropriate test coverage, observability, and operational documentation in place before anything goes live. • Contribute to delivery planning and estimation, providing realistic and well-reasoned views of effort and timelines. • Work with Security and Compliance teams to ensure solutions meet relevant regulatory requirements, including PCI DSS, SOX, and data privacy obligations, from the design stage onwards. Portal & Application Development • Lead the technical design and delivery of internal and dealer-facing portal applications, ensuring they are performant, secure, and integrate cleanly with backend services. • Establish frontend architecture standards for portal development — covering component structure, state management, and API consumption patterns — so that applications remain maintainable as the portfolio grows. • Provide technical input during product and UX design reviews, raising feasibility concerns or implementation complexity early before work reaches development. • Ensure accessibility and resilience are treated as requirements, not afterthoughts, across all portal development. Data, Reporting & Integration • Design and implement reliable data integration patterns across platforms, ensuring data flows between systems are accurate, auditable, and consistent. • Work with the Data and Analytics team to ensure platform data is correctly modelled and surfaced through dependable reporting pipelines. • Lead the technical build of reconciliation, audit, and financial reporting features that meet the accuracy and traceability standards required by Finance and Compliance stakeholders. • Drive the development of operational dashboards and internal reporting tools that give the business meaningful visibility into platform health and key metrics. • Ensure all data flows comply with enterprise data governance policies and relevant regulatory requirements. Engineering Standards & People Development • Set and uphold engineering standards across the team — covering code quality, testing strategy, API design, CI/CD practices, and observability — and ensure they are applied consistently. • Conduct regular code reviews and technical design reviews, providing specific and constructive feedback that helps engineers develop their skills over time. • Mentor engineers at different levels of experience, identifying development opportunities and supporting their progression within the team and the wider TFS Technology organisation. • Contribute to shared engineering practices and knowledge-sharing across the broader TFS engineering community. • Stay current with relevant technologies and industry practices, bringing new ideas into the team in a grounded and pragmatic way. TECHNICAL SKILLS & STACK Strong, practical experience across the following areas is expected. The depth required in each will depend on where the work takes you, but you should be genuinely comfortable leading a team that uses this kind of stack day to day. Backend & Integration • Java with Spring Boot — confident writing and reviewing production-quality backend services, with a solid understanding of Spring ecosystem patterns and best practices. • Mulesoft — experience designing and building APIs, integration flows, and connectors. Comfortable with Anypoint Platform, DataWeave transformations, and API-led connectivity approaches. • AWS - Microservices architecture — designing services that are well-bounded, independently deployable, and resilient. Experience with event-driven messaging patterns such as queues and streaming platforms. • REST and SOAP APIs — comfortable working across both, including legacy SOAP integrations common in enterprise financial services environments. • Python — used for automation, scripting, and data pipeline development. Cloud & Infrastructure • AWS — practical, hands-on experience with core compute, storage, messaging, and networking services across serverless, containerised, and managed service patterns. • Infrastructure as Code — managing cloud infrastructure through tools such as Terraform or CloudFormation. • CI/CD — experience owning and contributing to deployment pipelines using tools such as Jenkins, GitHub Actions, or equivalent platforms. • Containerisation — working knowledge of Docker and Kubernetes for service packaging, deployment, and orchestration. Data & Databases • Strong SQL skills and data modelling experience, with exposure to enterprise-grade databases such as PostgreSQL or Oracle. • Working knowledge of document or key-value stores such as MongoDB for appropriate use cases. • Data integration — experience building ETL/ELT pipelines and supporting reporting or data warehouse integrations. Frontend & Portals • Frontend frameworks — hands-on experience with React or Angular for building portal and internal tooling applications. • API integration — comfortable designing and consuming RESTful APIs from frontend applications, including authentication flows and error handling. • Component-based development — experience building and maintaining component libraries in an enterprise application context. WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR • Software engineering experience, with leading an engineering team and taking accountability for its technical direction and output. • A track record of delivering complex, cross-functional programmes in a large enterprise environment. Background in financial services, automotive, or a similarly regulated industry is an advantage. • Solid experience with legacy modernisation — you have led or played a central role in platform re-platforming or migration programmes and understand how to execute them without breaking live services. • Genuinely hands-on. A meaningful part of this role involves writing and reviewing production code alongside the team, not just directing from the sidelines. • Strong communicator who can present technical decisions clearly to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, and who builds trust with the people they work with. • Experience working within Agile delivery frameworks such as SAFe, Scrum, or Kanban in a scaled enterprise setting. • Working knowledge of financial services compliance requirements such as PCI DSS, SOX, and data privacy regulations, and how they shape technical decision-making