Tech lead

Location: Ghent, Flanders, Belgium

Department: Development

Workplace: hybrid

Employment Type: full

Description

At Optimile, we are building the future of e-mobility. We are a leading software company specializing in digital solutions for the electric vehicle (EV) charging industry. Our innovative platforms empower Charging Point Operators (CPOs) and Mobility Service Providers (MSPs) to deliver a seamless and efficient EV charging experience.

As we continue to grow internationally, we are looking for a tech lead who combines hands-on engineering with technical leadership to help our squads build scalable, reliable solutions.

This role is ideal for an experienced engineer who enjoys coding, guiding a team and shaping the technical direction of a product in a fast-moving tech environment.

Your role

As a Tech Lead, you are first and foremost an engineer. You spend a significant part of your time writing code and contributing directly to the product. Beyond that, you are the technical anchor of your squad: you shape solutions together with your product owner and designer from the moment a problem is defined, not after a spec is written.

You grow your squad into a team of engineers who can drive technical design, challenge assumptions, and take responsibility for technical outcomes themselves. Your goal is a squad that doesn't need you to make every technical call, because you've built the judgment and confidence to make them without you.

The Engineering Manager focuses on people and team growth, while the Tech Lead sets the technical direction and champions engineering excellence.    

Key responsibilities

1. Engineering & technical leadership

• Contribute actively to the codebase and support the squad in delivering high-quality solutions.
• Guide the team on technical design and implementation
• Assign and support technical owners for epics and initiatives
• Maintain visibility of technical debt and legacy constraints in your domain, collaborate with the Lead Architect and other Tech Leads on what crosses squad boundaries, and find ways to reduce legacy incrementally alongside work that delivers more visible value.
• Promote clean code and continuous improvement (‘leave the code better than you found it’) 
• Collaborate with other Tech Leads and the Lead Architect to keep technical decisions consistent across squads, flagging dependencies early and contributing your domain perspective to the wider architectural picture. 

2. Process & delivery

• Lead collaborative discovery as Technical Owner, shaping problems and solutions together with the product owner and designer before development begins.

• Support the squad when impediments arise: empower the team to resolve what they can themselves, and bring what they cannot to the right person, the engineering manager, product owner, or beyond.
• Review capacity planning with the product owner and flag technical risks, dependencies, or scope concerns they may not have visibility on.
• Guard the definition of done and team work agreements.
• Ensure work progresses smoothly through code reviews, testing and delivery.
• Participate in Agile ceremonies: stand-ups, planning, retrospectives, refinements, as the technical voice of the squad.

3. Team & colllaboration

• Mentor engineers into taking on technical ownership of initiatives, give them the opportunity, support them through it, and step back as they grow capable.
• Coach team members on technical craft: design thinking, code quality, and making trade-offs explicit.
• Encourage self-organization and ownership within the squad.
• Support the onboarding of new engineers and assist in technical interviews.

Your technical skills are:

• Strong Python / Django background. Comfortable navigating a large, evolving codebase, reasoning about performance and correctness at scale.
• Distributed systems experience. Async messaging (RabbitMQ / AMQP), failure handling, and idempotency in production.
• API and contract design. You know what makes a service boundary robust and what happens when it isn't.
• Database experience. Schema design, migration risk, and query performance; specifically PostgreSQL in a shared multi-module environment.
• Experience with EV charging protocols (OCPP, OCPI) is a plus, not a requirement. The domain is learnable. The engineering depth is not.

At Optimile, the code you write doesn’t just ship to production, it powers the infrastructure behind thousands of EV charging sessions across Europe.

As a Tech Lead, you’ll help shape both the technology and the team behind it, working with people who care deeply about clean architecture, collaboration and the future of mobility.

Ready to build the backbone of tomorrow’s charging ecosystem? Apply now!