Engineering Team Lead

Riva is seeking a hands-on Engineering Team Lead to guide the development of our AI-powered meeting intelligence product. This product transforms conversations between relationship managers and their clients into structured, CRM-ready insights, helping ensure that valuable client context is accurately captured and available when it is needed.

You will join one of Riva’s most AI-forward teams, where AI is integrated directly into the software development lifecycle. The team uses agentic workflows to support development and code review and continues to explore new ways for AI agents to take ownership of engineering work.

In this role, you will lead a small engineering team that is expected to approximately double in size. This is a hands‑on leadership position, with approximately 60–70% of your time focused on coding, architecture, and system design. The remainder of your time will be dedicated to supporting the team, strengthening engineering processes, and representing technical decisions in leadership discussions.

As the Engineering Team Lead, your responsibilities will be centered around delivering the following outcomes:

• Provide hands‑on technical leadership. Design, build, and maintain full‑stack product capabilities while contributing directly to coding, architecture, and system design.
• Own system architecture and workflow design. Lead high‑level architecture decisions and design reliable end‑to‑end workflows for an AI‑powered SaaS product.
• Lead an AI‑native development environment. Use and expand agentic AI workflows throughout the development lifecycle, including specification, implementation, review, testing, and delivery.
• Partner with Product. Work closely with the Product Owner to manage the backlog, refine requirements, estimate work, plan sprints, and support product rollouts and optimization.
• Strengthen engineering delivery. Own and continuously improve development workflows, CI/CD practices, release traceability, technical standards, and team processes.
• Manage technical risk. Track technical debt, identify dependencies approaching end of support, and clearly communicate risks, tradeoffs, blockers, and timelines before they affect delivery.
• Build quality into the product. Partner with the team’s tester to strengthen unit, integration, end‑to‑end, and automated test coverage, particularly for AI‑enabled features.
• Lead Agile team practices. Facilitate sprint planning, backlog refinement, demos, retrospectives, and other Agile ceremonies while maintaining visibility into delivery progress.
• Communicate technical decisions. Represent the team in bi‑weekly leadership meetings and explain architecture, timelines, risks, and technical decisions to both technical and non‑technical audiences.
• Coach and develop the team. Hold regular one‑on‑one meetings, provide timely feedback, mentor engineers, support performance reviews, and create opportunities for continued growth.
• Scale the team effectively. Establish the structure, processes, and working practices needed to support the team as it grows.
• Actively engage in your career progression. Examine your skill gaps and identify opportunities for training, industry certifications, and project work to elevate your skills and support continued career growth.

During your first 30 days, you will focus primarily on learning the product, roadmap, development environment, internal processes, and business domain, including CRM, banking, messaging systems, and specification‑driven development. By 60 days, you will begin contributing low‑risk production work and establish a plan to address any identified skill gaps. By 90 days, you will be operating at full capacity. Over your first 6–12 months, you will build a strong partnership with Product, take ownership of release traceability, and begin contributing to higher‑leverage initiatives such as improving client onboarding.

• Leadership
  
  Experience:
  
  
• Proven experience leading a software engineering team.
• Experience owning system design, architecture, backlog management, delivery reporting, and engineering workflow improvements.
• Experience presenting technical decisions, risks,…