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About the Opportunity
Join arenaflex as a Technical Lead II on our Live Chat Backend Team and help shape the future of real-time customer communication at scale. We're building a first-class product that empowers support teams to assist their customers quickly and easily through seamless real-time conversations. This is a highly scaled product handling millions of messages with exceptional performance and reliability, and we're looking to expand this system to create a holistic service that supports your customers far beyond just traditional chat capabilities.
As a Tech Lead II at arenaflex, you'll be joining a team of passionate builders who are dedicated to creating impactful solutions. You'll have the opportunity to lead a small team while remaining hands-on with code, balancing your technical passion with leadership responsibilities. This role offers the perfect blend of technical execution and people development, making it ideal for experienced engineers who want to grow their leadership skills while staying close to the technology.
What You'll Be Building
The Live Chat Platform at arenaflex represents one of our most critical customer-facing systems. You'll be working on features that directly impact how millions of users interact with businesses every single day. Your technical decisions will shape the experience of customers seeking support, making this role both challenging and incredibly rewarding.
In this position, your team will be responsible for:
- Technical Execution and Delivery: Participating in the technical execution and delivery of new features that improve time to value for our customers, ensuring rapid iteration while maintaining exceptional quality standards.
- System Unification: Unifying separate systems into a cohesive chat experience that provides a seamless interaction layer for end users across all touchpoints.
- AI Innovation: Exploring generative AI opportunities to help our customers move faster and achieve better outcomes through intelligent automation and assistance.
- Infrastructure Excellence: Making use of industry-leading third-party tools as well as robust home-grown infrastructure powering the arenaflex Engineering organization.
- Data Infrastructure: Building and scaling a robust data infrastructure that serves the entire organization with reliable, real-time data processing capabilities.
Technology Stack
Our services need to accomplish a tremendous amount of work in very little time, and we rely heavily on performant technologies to help achieve these ambitious goals. Here's what you'll be working with:
- Programming Language: Java 11 - We write extensive microservices using this robust, enterprise-grade language
- Framework: Dropwizard - Our APIs are RESTful and built on this lightweight framework
- Message Processing: Apache Kafka - For processing large volumes of data with high throughput and reliability
- Architecture: Microservices design patterns with a focus on scalability and resilience
- Cloud Infrastructure: Modern cloud-native deployments with comprehensive monitoring and observability
Key Responsibilities
As a Tech Lead II, you are a player-coach responsible for leading a small team while maintaining your technical edge. You will be recognized as a high-performing engineer who identifies as a maker and builder first, with leadership as a natural extension of your technical expertise.
Leadership and Team Development
- Oversee a small team of talented engineers, providing technical guidance, product direction, and coaching to team members
- Collaborate with Product, Design, and other Tech Leads within your team to establish relevant, compelling, and challenging goals
- Actively work with other Tech Leads to address and resolve cross-team issues, fostering a culture of collaboration
- Take proactive ownership of the team's on-call health, product reliability, and overall quality
- Serve as an active member of the team's leadership triad, helping to co-set the team's direction and strategy
Technical Excellence
- Maintain hands-on coding responsibilities approximately 70% of your time, staying current with technical implementation details
- Lead by example in writing high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code
- Participate in architecture discussions and technical decision-making processes
- Ensure technical debt is managed proactively and refactoring opportunities are identified
- Champion best practices in code reviews, testing, and documentation
Mentorship and Growth
- Have a vested interest in the direction of the product, actively participating in decision-making rather than deferring to others
- Be committed to the growth of team members, enabling them to take on increasingly complex tasks
- Focus on cultivating Software Engineers into Senior Software Engineers
- Nurture Senior Software Engineers into future Tech Leads and Staff Engineers
- Regularly evaluate team members' performance and provide necessary coaching, guidance, and learning opportunities
- Support each team member's career growth through personalized development plans
What We're Looking For
Essential Qualifications
- Strong senior engineer with experience leading small teams in a technical capacity
- Demonstrated passion for writing code and reading code - you stay current with technology and enjoy hands-on work
- Experience fostering an environment that encourages autonomy and psychological safety
- Understanding of the value of building a diverse team, with commitment to being a champion and upstander for Diversity, Inclusion, and Belonging initiatives
- Experience mentoring and coaching other team members in a psychologically safe way, while also being open to learning from them
- Strong background in distributed systems and microservices architecture
- Experience with Java or similar object-oriented programming languages
- Familiarity with message queue systems like Kafka
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with real-time communication systems or chat platforms
- Background in high-scale, high-availability systems handling millions of requests
- Experience with AI/ML integration in consumer-facing products
- Track record of successfully growing engineers into more senior roles
- Experience with remote team leadership and distributed team collaboration
- Knowledge of cloud infrastructure and DevOps practices
Skills and Competencies
To succeed in this role, you'll need a combination of technical depth and leadership capabilities:
- Technical Leadership: Ability to guide technical decisions while remaining hands-on with implementation
- Communication: Clear, articulate communication skills for collaborating across teams and presenting technical concepts
- Problem-Solving: Strong analytical skills for tackling complex technical challenges
- Mentorship: Genuine interest in developing others and sharing knowledge
- Strategic Thinking: Ability to connect technical work to business outcomes
- Adaptability: Comfortable with ambiguity and able to pivot as requirements evolve
- Ownership Mindset: Takes responsibility for outcomes and sees projects through to completion
Career Growth Opportunities
At arenaflex, we believe in investing in our people and providing clear pathways for career advancement. As a Tech Lead II, you'll have numerous opportunities to grow your career:
- Leadership Development: Build your leadership skills while maintaining technical depth - the best of both worlds
- Technical Mastery: Work on cutting-edge technology at scale, solving problems that few engineers get to tackle
- Mentorship Pipeline: Develop future leaders by growing Senior Engineers into Tech Leads and Staff Engineers
- Cross-Functional Exposure: Work closely with Product, Design, and other engineering teams
- Innovation Opportunities: Explore new technologies like generative AI and bring innovative ideas to life
- Industry Recognition: Build expertise in real-time communication systems - a highly valued skill set
We've seen our Tech Leads progress into Staff Engineers, Engineering Managers, and Director roles depending on their interests and strengths. We're committed to supporting whatever path you choose.
Work Environment and Culture
At arenaflex, we value both flexibility and connection. Whether you're a Remote employee or work from the Office, we want you to build strong connections with your team and peers. We believe that great work happens when people feel connected to their colleagues and aligned around a common mission.
Our culture is grounded in four key commitments that shape how we work, lead, and grow:
- Solve for the Customer: Everything we do starts with understanding and solving customer problems
- Be Bold: We take risks, dream big, and aren't afraid to fail forward
- Learn Fast: We embrace continuous learning and rapid iteration
- Align, Adapt & Go!: We stay aligned on goals, adapt to change, and move with purpose
We're building a company where people can do their best work. We focus on brilliant work, not badge swipes. By combining clarity, ownership, and trust, we create space for big thinking and meaningful progress. When our employees grow, our customers grow too.
Compensation and Benefits
Cash Compensation
The cash compensation range for this position is $191,100 - $305,800 USD annually. This includes base salary, and for eligible roles, on-target commission and annual bonus targets. Individual compensation packages are tailored to your skills, experience, qualifications, and other job-related factors.
We also offer participation in our equity plan for eligible roles, providing you with restricted stock units (RSUs) that allow you to share in the company's success. Some roles may also be eligible for overtime pay.
Comprehensive Benefits
Benefits are an important piece of your total compensation package. At arenaflex, we offer extensive benefits and perks designed to help employees grow better and live their best lives:
- Comprehensive health, dental, and vision insurance
- Flexible paid time off and generous vacation policies
- Parental leave for growing families
- 401(k) retirement savings plan with company matching
- Professional development budget for conferences, courses, and certifications
- Wellness programs and mental health support
- Home office stipend for remote workers
- Continuous learning opportunities and career growth programs
At arenaflex, fair compensation practices aren't just about checking off the box for legal compliance. It's about living out our value of transparency with our employees, candidates, and community.
Remote Work Details
This position is designated as Remote US, giving you the flexibility to work from anywhere within the United States. However, we do value in-person connection, and if you're joining our Engineering team, you will be required to attend a regional arenaflex office for in-person onboarding.
Additionally, Engineering team members attend other in-person events such as Product Group Summits and other gatherings to continue building on those connections. We believe this hybrid approach balances the flexibility of remote work with the collaboration and relationship-building that happens through in-person interactions.
If you require accommodations due to travel limitations or other reasons, please inform your recruiter during the hiring process. We're committed to supporting candidates who may need alternative arrangements.
Our Commitment to Inclusion
We know the confidence gap and impostor syndrome can get in the way of meeting spectacular candidates, so please don't hesitate to apply - we'd love to hear from you. We're committed to creating an inclusive environment where all employees can do their best work.
arenaflex is an equal opportunity employer. We don't discriminate based on race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, or any other protected characteristic. We value diverse perspectives and believe that diverse teams build better products.
Join Us
If you're a passionate engineer who loves to code and wants to lead a team while staying hands-on, we want to talk to you. This is an opportunity to work on a product that impacts millions of users, solve challenging technical problems at scale, and grow your career with a company that's committed to both customer success and employee growth.
Apply today and become part of a team that's building the future of customer communication. We're bold, we're fast, and we win together. Come do your best work at arenaflex.
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