Lead, Product Engineering

Location: Karachi, Sindh, Pakistan

Department: Technology & Data

Workplace: on_site

Employment Type: full

Description

We are seeking a hands-on Lead, Product Engineering with a strong product mindset to lead the development and evolution of consumer-facing digital products.

This role requires deep technical expertise, leadership capability, and ownership across the full stack—application and infrastructure. The ideal candidate has built and scaled real-world consumer products, demonstrates strong engineering judgment, and is comfortable challenging product requirements to deliver better solutions.

This is a hands-on leadership role requiring active involvement in architecture, coding, and engineering practices—not just team management.

Responsibilities:

• Lead end-to-end product engineering for consumer-facing and backend systems
• Take ownership of existing platforms and drive improvements in scalability, reliability, and performance
• Contribute hands-on to application development, architecture design, and infrastructure (cloud & IaC)
• Define and enforce coding standards, design principles, and engineering best practices
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and Business teams to refine requirements and challenge assumptions
• Build, mentor, and manage high-performing engineering teams
• Drive adoption of cloud-native architectures, DevSecOps, and automation-first practices
• Ensure systems meet security, compliance, and regulatory requirements (especially in a banking environment)
• Own architectural decision-making and drive long-term platform scalability, resilience, and engineering strategy
• Ensure production stability, operational excellence, and incident ownership for critical systems

AI-Augmented Engineering & Vibe Coding Culture

At HugoBank, we recognize that AI-assisted development is now a core part of modern engineering workflows.

We support the responsible use of AI-assisted development tools such as GitHub Copilot, Google Gemini, and Claude to enhance productivity, accelerate development, and improve developer experience.

However, we emphasize that:

• AI tools are accelerators, not substitutes for engineering thinking
• Engineers must fully understand, validate, and own all generated code
• Strong fundamentals in system design, debugging, and problem-solving remain essential

As a Lead, you will:

• Define best practices for responsible AI-assisted development
• Guide teams on effective and secure use of AI tools
• Ensure AI improves quality, maintainability, and security—not just speed
• Build a culture of AI-augmented engineering with strong ownership and accountability

Team Development & Engineering Culture

The Lead, Product Engineering will help shape a high-performing engineering organization by:

1. AI-Augmented Engineering: Promote responsible AI usage with clear guardrails, ensuring validation, security compliance, and avoidance of blind copy-paste development
2. Engineering Fundamentals: Strengthen system design, distributed systems, data structures, and debugging skills while balancing AI-driven speed with engineering depth
3. Engineering Standards: Drive clean code practices, robust testing, CI/CD maturity, and structured design thinking
4. Mentorship & Growth: Develop engineers across all levels in cloud-native development, microservices, DevSecOps, and AI-assisted workflows
5. Ownership Culture: Foster end-to-end ownership, production accountability, and continuous improvement mindset

Requirements

• Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field
• 12–15+ years of experience in software/product engineering
• 3–5+ years of experience in a leadership role
• Proven experience in building and scaling consumer-facing digital products
• Strong hands-on experience in modern programming languages (Java, Kotlin, Node.js, Python, Go)
• Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred) and cloud-native architectures
• Strong experience with infrastructure-as-code (Terraform, Pulumi, CloudFormation)
• Experience with microservices, APIs, and distributed systems
• Strong understanding of secure coding and cloud security principles
• Experience with CI/CD, automated testing, and release management
• Demonstrated ability to lead teams while remaining technically hands-on
• Strong problem-solving, communication, and stakeholder management skills

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience in fintech, digital banking, or regulated environments
• Exposure to high-scale, high-availability systems
• Familiarity with compliance, security, and data protection requirements