The Manila Team Lead serves as the on-the-ground technical leader for the entire Philippines development center. This is a dual role combining hands-on senior full-stack development with team leadership responsibilities. The individual will lead daily operations, serve as the primary code review gatekeeper, and act as the escalation point for all technical blockers. They are expected to be the strongest full-stack developer on the India team, equally comfortable architecting React/TypeScript frontends, building NestJS backend services, writing Python data pipelines, and working with AI/ML integration patterns. This role is the critical bridge between the India development team and US-based engineering leadership.
Team Leadership & Coordination
- Lead daily standups for the Manila team (9:00 AM PHT) track progress, identify blockers, ensure alignment.
- Participate in US handoff standup (5:00 PM ET / 6:00 AM PHT) communicate status, escalate issues, align priorities.
- Distribute work items and manage capacity within the India team based on sprint goals.
- Serve as the first escalation point for all technical blockers before raising to the Engineering Manager.
- Conduct 1-on-1s with team members focused on technical growth and performance.
- Facilitate sprint planning, backlog refinement, and retrospectives for the India pod.
Full-Stack Development (React + Backend)
- Develop complex full-stack features across React/TypeScript (web), React Native (mobile), and NestJS (backend).
- Architect and implement frontend component libraries, design systems, and reusable UI modules.
- Build and maintain RESTful APIs and GraphQL services using NestJS with proper documentation.
- Contribute to Python-based data processing pipelines, document workflows, and AI integration layers.
- Implement state management solutions (Redux Toolkit, Zustand, React Query) for complex application flows.
- Optimize performance across frontend (Core Web Vitals) and backend (API response times, database queries).
Code Quality & Architecture
- Serve as the code review gatekeeper for ALL India-originated PRs (frontend, backend, mobile, infrastructure).
- Conduct architecture reviews for major features before development begins.
- Establish and enforce coding standards, linting rules, testing conventions, and PR quality bars.
- Own the technical debt backlog for India-developed services and drive refactoring priorities.
- Define API contracts and service boundaries in collaboration with the US architecture team.
Mentorship & Team Development
- Mentor mid-level and junior developers across both frontend and backend domains.
- Conduct regular knowledge-sharing sessions on architecture patterns, new technologies, and best practices.
- Identify skill gaps within the team and create targeted learning plans.
- Lead by example demonstrate high-quality code, thorough testing, and thoughtful system design.
Qualifications:
- 6+ years of full-stack development with React/TypeScript and NestJS/Node.js.
- Strong TypeScript expertise generics, strict mode, type-safe API contracts across frontend and backend.
- NestJS proficiency modules, providers, guards, interceptors, microservices patterns.
- Python competency FastAPI/Flask, scripting, data processing, async programming.
- React Native experience cross-platform mobile development, native module integration.
- Database design skills PostgreSQL and NoSQL (MongoDB/DynamoDB) schema design and optimization.
- AWS hands-on experience Lambda, EC2, RDS, S3, CloudFront, ECS; Azure familiarity.
- AI/ML fundamentals vector databases, embeddings, RAG patterns, LLM API integration.
- Team leadership experience managed 510 person development teams.
- Excellent English communication (written and verbal) daily interaction with US-based leadership.
- Agile/Scrum experience sprint planning, retrospectives, Jira, Confluence.
