Tech Lead Manager

Tech Lead Manager — Payments & Platform

Location: Bengaluru

Reports to: Engineering Manager / Senior EM

Experience: 8–10 years

About BukuWarung

BukuWarung is Indonesia's leading financial services platform for micro, small and medium merchants — the warungs that make up the backbone of Indonesia's economy. Our Payments & Platform group builds the acceptance, disbursement, settlement, reconciliation and platform rails that connect banks, PSPs and internal systems, at a scale and correctness standard most engineers never get to work at.

The Role

We're hiring a Tech Lead Manager to own a slice of Payments & Platform engineering — architecture, delivery and people — for a team of 4–5 engineers. This is a genuinely hybrid seat: real time in the code and in design reviews, and real ownership of hiring, coaching and managing the people who build alongside you. You report to an Engineering Manager / Senior EM and act as the technical and people anchor for your pod.

What you'll do

• Own architecture and technical direction for your area within Payments & Platform

• Stay hands-on: review and write code, debug production issues, and set the technical bar by example, not just by review comment

• Manage, coach and grow 4–5 engineers — 1:1s, performance conversations, hiring, and levelling calls

• Partner with product, risk and compliance to translate business requirements into systems that move money correctly, every time

• Own production reliability and incident response for your area — detection, root-causing, and structural fixes that prevent recurrence, not just patches

• Make build-vs-rent and platform-vs-point-solution calls, and defend them with real trade-off reasoning

• Bring judgment to where and how the team uses AI tooling — leverage it for velocity without compromising money-critical paths

What we're looking for

• 8–10 years of software engineering experience, with real ownership of distributed backend systems at scale

• Experience in fintech, banking, or another high-compliance domain 

• Proven ability to operate hands-on while managing people — this is not a seat for someone who wants to step back from the code

• Direct experience managing or leading a small engineering team, formally or as a tech lead with real people responsibilities

• Strong systems-design fundamentals: data modelling, concurrency, and failure-mode reasoning under partial failure

• Judgment on where AI tooling helps and where it doesn't — able to articulate a real boundary, not a slogan

• Comfortable operating in a fast-moving, less-finished environment than a mature platform — this is a builder's seat, not a maintainer's

Nice to have

• Direct experience with payments, ledgers, settlement or reconciliation systems

• Experience working with or managing distributed/remote engineering teams

• A track record of raising the technical or people bar around you — an artifact, a process, or a person you've grown

Our engineering bar

BukuWarung's engineering culture is entrepreneurial — we value input quality and product thinking over raw coding output. We hire engineers who push back with evidence, own outcomes beyond their immediate remit, and are honest about what they know and don't. AI Leverage with Judgment is part of our standard evaluation bar for this role, weighted appropriately for a hands-on manager rather than a pure IC.