About Very
(Remote – Canada)
Very is a fully distributed technology firm led by expert problem-solvers who create efficient, scalable solutions that move commercial, industrial, and consumer products from pilot to production in record time.
We believe that real innovation happens in the grind — working shoulder to shoulder with clients who are building the future. Our team thrives on that energy. When we’re not helping clients deliver business-critical outcomes, we’re refining our craft and celebrating what it means to do hard things well.
We’ve built a collaborative, tight-knit culture that thrives in both remote and in-person settings. We’ve won numerous workplace awards over the years, including Great Place to Work certification and recognition from Parity.org as a Best Company for Women to Advance.
Our clients include well-known brands like Vizio, Peloton, Clear, iHeart Radio, and Fellowes — all determined to leverage connected devices and AI to drive meaningful impact. Our job is simple: help them win.
As a Software Engineering Team Lead, you'll lead a team of 3 to 5 engineers embedded in a client's engineering organization through Very's staff augmentation model, working on high-traffic, business-critical systems. Your team's main focus is AWS: designing a multi-region architecture for redundancy and scale, and defining it as code with AWS CDK and Terraform. The team also works across the stack, from backend services to front-end features.
This is a full-time, long-term role that combines people leadership with hands-on technical work. You'll set direction for your team, own their delivery and growth, and stay close enough to the code to review designs, unblock engineers and step in during incidents. You'll work in the client's codebase, tools and processes, partner day to day with their engineering and product leaders, and stay part of the Very team. At Very, a manager is accountable for both what the team ships and how the team works.
This is not an easy role. You'll work under real deadlines with a client who expects you and your team to be available, proactive and delivering from day one. If you like doing hard things well, you'll fit right in.
What You’ll Be Working On
As the leader of an embedded team within the client's engineering organization, you'll:
Lead a team of 3 to 5 software engineers.
This is a player-coach role: you’ll lead the team and also spend a meaningful part of your week as a hands-on engineer, writing and reviewing code alongside them.
Plan and prioritize the team's work with client engineering and product leaders, and own delivery against sprint and roadmap commitments.
Own technical requirements and lead high-level and low-level design for cloud solutions on AWS.
Lead the design and rollout of multi-region AWS architecture, including redundancy, failover and disaster recovery for critical services.
Set standards for how the team defines, deploys and maintains infrastructure as code using AWS CDK and Terraform.
Guide the team in building and scaling complex, microservice-based, event-driven systems.
Oversee feature work across backend and frontend components, and contribute code where it helps the team.
Set the team's testing strategy and automation across the stack.
Own the team's production support and incident response, and maintain system health, performance and reliability.
Collaborate across engineering, design and product to deliver high-quality outcomes.
Identify and proactively address potential technical or operational risks before they affect customers.
You and your team will operate in a modern, polyglot environment that includes:
Cloud: AWS (Lambda, ECS, Fargate, RDS, DynamoDB, CloudFront, CloudWatch, SNS, SQS)
Infrastructure as Code: AWS CDK, Terraform
Backend: Python, Node.js, TypeScript, distributed APIs and worker services
Frontend: React, TypeScript
DevOps: Docker, GitHub Actions, CI/CD pipelines
Databases: Postgres, Redis, DynamoDB
Testing: Jest, Cypress, Pytest and other…