Tech Lead (Python / API Squad)

Datasets is a product within the Source ecosystem that turns real-time public web data into structured datasets for businesses, data teams, and AI developers. Like the other companies across Source, it runs independently while drawing on shared standards and expertise.

The team waiting for you:

Our API Squad owns the public and internal APIs that give customers access to Datasets Products' extensive B2B dataset of company, employee and job records. You’ll join a small team of three Python developers as its dedicated Tech Lead, staying hands-on with code while guiding architecture decisions and mentoring engineers — without direct reports. The platform is evolving quickly as we rebuild our billing and credits system, scale event-driven data delivery and develop new ways to package our data. Your challenge will be to keep our high-traffic APIs reliable as they grow, establish clear technical ownership and help the team build systems it can confidently maintain together.

In this role, you will:

• Design and build production Python services behind our high-traffic public and internal APIs, contributing code whenever the team needs it.
• Lead architecture decisions and design reviews across the API platform, including API gateways, authentication, search and real-time data services.
• Improve API reliability and operability through testing, monitoring, alerting and incident follow-ups, while strengthening development workflows, CI/CD and automation.
• Work with Product and neighbouring engineering squads to define technical interfaces, agree on standards and make pragmatic architectural trade-offs.
• Build shared ownership of services through knowledge sharing and clear documentation, ensuring critical systems can be operated and supported by more than one engineer.
• Mentor developers through code reviews, pairing and design feedback, balancing delivery speed with long-term maintainability.

• 5+ years of professional Python backend development experience.
• Experience designing and operating high-traffic REST APIs, including API versioning, backward compatibility and production incident response.
• Experience working with relational and search databases, such as PostgreSQL and Elasticsearch, including query performance optimisation.
• Experience leading technical decisions, mentoring engineers and facilitating design reviews — with or without a formal leadership title.
• Clear communication, pragmatic problem-solving and the ability to navigate changing priorities and collaborate across teams.

Nice to have

• Experience with API gateways.
• Experience with message queues and asynchronous workers, such as RabbitMQ or Celery.
• Familiarity with exposing data APIs to AI agents through MCP, tool calling or similar approaches.
• Familiarity with a second programming language.
• Experience operating services with Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD and observability tools such as GitLab CI, Grafana, OpenTelemetry or Sentry.
• Understanding of distributed systems concepts, including idempotency, retries and eventual consistency.

• Growth & Learning: 40+ internal learning options, external conferences, mentorship, and year-round knowledge-sharing.
• Health & Well-being: Private health insurance, psychotherapy, on-site well-being consultants, 24/7 gym access, and a wellness app.
• Celebration & Community: Team events, an overseas workation, quarterly team-building budgets, and plenty of ways to mark milestones together.
• Plus bonus vacation days, paid life-moment days off, barista coffee, and all the tools you need.