Engineering Team Leader

Team Leader, Engineering

About Remote

Hiring across borders is hard. Paying people correctly, staying on the right side of local labor law, actually understanding compliance in a dozen different countries at once — most companies just aren't set up for it. That's the gap Remote fills. We help businesses, big or small, build international teams without all the legal and logistical headaches that usually come with it.

We're fully remote, and not in a loose, "well, some of us work from home" kind of way. Remoters are scattered across six continents right now (Antarctica's still on the list). Innovation is one of the values we actually hold ourselves to, which is why automation and AI capability have become baseline expectations for every role here, not some optional extra.

We want people who show up as themselves — whatever background, perspective, or working style they bring with them — because honestly, that's what makes this place better. If you're curious, a little restless in a good way, and want a hand in shaping what work looks like going forward, we'd like to hear from you.

The Role

A Team Leader is responsible for what their team produces and acts as the voice for that team across the rest of the org. You don't need to be the sharpest engineer on the team — you need to help the people who are, and everyone else, do their best work. It's less about individual brilliance and more about pointing a group of people in a smart direction and clearing the way.

If you want a sense of how Remote's engineering org is built to move quickly, there's a Keynote talk on it — domain boundaries, dependency management, how we keep workers from stepping on each other, ownership-driven observability. Worth watching before you apply, honestly.

What the Job Actually Looks Like

You'll run a small product team, somewhere between three and five engineers, a mix of backend and frontend folks. Roughly 30% of your time goes to management. The rest you're heads-down with the team, shipping product alongside them, not just watching from above.

Hiring is part of the job too — for your own team mostly, but you'll likely get pulled in to help other teams hire as well. And once someone joins, getting them properly onboarded falls on you.

Because you're the one speaking for the team, a lot of the day-to-day comes down to managing how people work together. Feedback shouldn't be something that only happens at review time; it should just be part of how the team operates. You're also on the hook for each person's growth, not just whatever they shipped this sprint. That means actual coaching, sitting with someone through a hard problem, not just a once-a-month check-in.

There's a newer piece to this role too. Engineering work is shifting toward autonomous agents doing a lot of the execution, and you'll be expected to rethink how work ships because of that. Practically, this means building agentic workflows — spec it, plan it, execute, verify — that genuinely speed things up rather than just sound good in a slide deck. You'll build patterns and tools into the codebase that other teams can reuse, and lean on tests, evals, and guardrails to make sure whatever ships is actually correct and won't fall over later.

What We're Looking For


You've managed at least two engineers before, even informally.
Deep backend experience — Elixir/Phoenix, Ruby, or functional programming generally.
You actually believe in Remote's values, not just say you do in an interview.
A track record of shipping production systems that hold up — secure, reliable, built to scale.
You've built or adopted agentic and automation workflows yourself, and you've iterated on them when they didn't quite work the first time.
You think in systems. Clear specs, plans broken into real steps, verification built in, loops that actually close.
Solid communicator, written and spoken.
Good grasp of engineering fundamentals and you keep up with how the field moves.
Organized, detail-oriented, the kind of person who doesn't need a second reminder.
You care about efficient process but you're not willing to steamroll people to get there.
Other people tend to feel more capable after working with you, not less.
A real read on team dynamics — the stuff that never shows up in a job posting.
Diversity, equity, and inclusion matter to you in practice, not just as talking points.
Comfortable and fluent with AI tools — it's just part of how you work now.


The Practical Stuff


Reports to: Engineering Manager
Direct reports: 2–5 engineers
Team: Engineering
Location: Anywhere
Start date: As soon as we find the right person


How the Process Goes

About six hours total, spread out over six weeks or so:


Call with a recruiter
Interview with the hiring manager
Async code challenge, then a review of it
Interview with a few future teammates
Bar raiser interview
Executive interview
Offer, plus the standard prior-employment check (more on that at remote.com/employment-checks)


On Pay

We try to pay fairly, and we mean that seriously — we're not interested in paying less just because someone happens to live somewhere with a lower cost of labor. Wherever we hire, we pay above the local market rate, on purpose. The idea is to bring real wealth into the places our people actually live, not take advantage of a wage gap. We'd love to see more companies hire this way.

You'll probably notice our salary bands are wide. That's not an accident — we're a globally distributed team, and the ranges reflect real differences in cost of living and pay norms from one place to another.