Tech Lead - Platform Squad

About Pelico

At Pelico, state-of-the-art technology meets supply-chain expertise in the search for operational excellence. Our manufacturing intelligence platform helps factories at Safran, Airbus, Daikin and other aerospace, defense, and industrial leaders stay agile and resilient — turning disruption into decisions. We're a fast-growing international SaaS scale-up: 180+ Pelicans, 36+ nationalities, across Paris and Miami, making real impact, every day, on the ground. 💙

About the Platform squads

Pelico is a configuration-driven, AI-native platform: a field engineer stands up a running factory application by authoring YAML — schema, algorithms, widgets, actions, agents — instead of writing code. The Platform squads build the reusable blocks that make that possible, and we run them as a product: our customers are other engineers — the Solution squads, our Regional Solution Engineering pods, and customer AI teams building on top of us.

You'll lead one squad — the configurability framework, the compute layer, the widget surface, the agent-development substrate (MCP/LSP/harness/BYOM), the integration layer, or the end-user Copilot — owning a capability cluster the whole company builds on.

Your mission

You'll own a platform capability end to end — and ship it yourself:

1. Build the substrate. Author the framework, SPI, runtime, or AI tooling other squads depend on, and review the rest at architectural depth.

2. Run it as a product. Own the roadmap, the contracts your consumers rely on, the adoption metric, and the deprecation policy that keeps the surface clean.

3. Set the bar. Author specs, run the spec-driven workflow, and stand up the eval and review gates that make agent-authored code trustworthy.

4. Harvest the field. Turn recurring customer patterns into platform capabilities, so learning compounds instead of fragmenting into bespoke forks.

5. Lead by example. Write the load-bearing code, pair with your engineers, raise their craft, and grow the squad as the leverage you ship earns it.

Your impact

Every Solution squad and every customer deployment is only as strong as the platform underneath it. Own a capability cluster well and you create leverage the entire company compounds on — the difference between a platform that scales and a pile of one-off forks.

What we're looking for

This is a lead-by-example role for a senior engineer who builds platforms other engineers love. You're excited by deep, high-blast-radius problems, you measure yourself by what others build on your work, and you lead by being among the best engineers in the room.

You'll need:

• A track record of shipping production platform / framework / infrastructure that other engineers build on (SPIs, libraries, runtimes, dev tooling, or AI substrate)

• Deep, current hands-on coding — we build in Kotlin / Java 25 (TypeScript/React for the experience squads); strong here, or a fast learner

• Real API / SPI / abstraction-design judgment, with a feel for performance and correctness at scale (up to hundreds of millions of records)

• A platform-as-product mindset — you optimize for adoption and others' leverage, and you're comfortable deprecating

• A track record of leading senior engineers by example, not by leaving the keyboard

Nice to have:

• Running a team as an internal platform (adoption metrics, internal NPS, deprecation, roadmap)

• Squad-relevant depth — codegen/annotation processors, Kubernetes/IaC/observability, React/design systems, MCP/LSP/agent harnesses, ERP/connectors, or end-user agent UX

• AI-native ways of working (agentic workflows, eval harnesses, spec-driven development)

• Aerospace / defense / discrete-manufacturing context

• French is a plus, not a requirement

If you bring the essentials and a strong mix of the rest, we want to hear from you — we're hiring the person who'll make this real, not a checklist.

What we offer

• A real ownership mandate over a capability cluster, with equity in a category-defining scale-up

• Deep, high-leverage problems with real customers and real scale

• An AI-native engineering culture and a small, elite squad — be challenged, learn, and have fun

• Hybrid working from our Paris HQ, an international team of 36+ nationalities

Your interview experience

1. Intro call with Talent Acquisition (30 min)

2. Hiring manager conversation with the VP Engineering (45 min)

3. Case Study onsite 1h30 / 2h

4. Leadership conversation + founders (CEO/CTO)

5. Offer + References, run in parallel

Pelico is an equal-opportunity employer. We celebrate diversity and are committed to building a team that reflects the manufacturers we serve. All applications are reviewed — we'll get back to you.