Lead Engineer - AI Payments App

About the role

BJAK, the leading insurance platform in Southeast Asia, is looking for a Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of complex products and systems and raise the engineering bar across the team. This is a hands-on technical leadership role, combining architecture and implementation, and is focused on an AI payments application. The role is hybrid, with at least three days per week in the local office.

Key responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and execution of major products, features and engineering initiatives.
• Design scalable, reliable and maintainable systems across backend, frontend, APIs, databases and infrastructure.
• Stay hands-on through coding, prototyping, code reviews, debugging and production problem-solving.
• Make architecture decisions and technical trade-offs balancing speed, scalability, reliability and maintainability.
• Break ambiguous problems into clear engineering solutions and execution plans.
• Set a high bar for code quality, system design, testing, security, observability and production reliability.
• Review designs and code from other engineers and give clear, actionable feedback.
• Mentor engineers and strengthen technical capability across the team.
• Identify technical risks, bottlenecks and architectural weaknesses early.
• Work with engineering, product, design and AI teams to ship high-quality products quickly.
• Improve engineering tooling, development practices and automation.
• Monitor production, investigate incidents, resolve root causes and improve reliability.

Required profile

• Strong software engineering background with significant experience building and shipping production systems.
• Proven experience leading major engineering projects or providing technical leadership to other engineers.
• Able to explain complex technical decisions clearly and influence engineers across teams.
• Strong product sense, connecting technical decisions to customer and business outcomes.
• Able to work fast with ambiguity and take ownership from problem definition through production.
• Not for engineers who want a leadership title without writing or reviewing code, who only want one narrow technical area, or who avoid production incidents and debugging.

Required skills

• Deep technical expertise in one or more areas such as backend, frontend, distributed systems, APIs, databases or cloud infrastructure.
• Strong system design and architecture skills for complex or high-scale systems.
• Strong coding ability and willingness to remain hands-on.
• Strong English communication; the role is advertised in Tokyo.