Tech Lead (Hands-on) - Full Stack

Property Finder is the leading property portal in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region, dedicated to shaping an inclusive future for real estate while spearheading the region’s growing tech ecosystem. At its core is a clear and powerful purpose: To change living for good in the region.

Founded on the value of great ambitions, Property Finder connects millions of property seekers with thousands of real estate professionals every day. The platform offers a seamless and enriching experience, empowering both buyers and renters to make informed decisions. Since its inception in 2007, Property Finder has evolved into a trusted partner for developers, brokers, and home seekers. As a lighthouse tech company, it continues to create an environment where people can thrive and contribute meaningfully to the transformation of real estate in MENA.

About the Role

This is a hands-on Tech Lead role: you’ll spend about 80% of your time writing, reviewing and shipping code. You’ll build across the stack of the region’s leading property marketplace, from the Next.js web experience to the TypeScript and Go services behind it, where latency, reliability and cost directly shape the experience of millions of buyers, renters and agents.

You’ll lead the team’s technical work from inside the codebase. You’ll set direction through the code you write, the designs you propose and the reviews you give.

What You’ll Build (about 80% of your time)

• Ship features end to end, from the React/Next.js UI through the TypeScript (Node.js) and Go services, APIs and data stores behind it, all the way to production
• Design and build APIs and service boundaries that other teams can safely depend on
• Make the web fast and findable: server-side rendering, caching, Core Web Vitals, SEO-critical pages and Arabic right-to-left layouts
• Evolve our existing Go services while building new ones in TypeScript, and keep both well tested and easy to change
• Own what you ship in production: instrument it, define SLOs and alerts, join the on-call rotation, debug incidents and fix root causes
• Build product ideas behind feature flags and A/B experiments, then use production metrics to judge what worked
• Prototype quickly to de-risk an idea before the team commits to it
• Improve the team’s engineering foundations, such as tests, CI/CD, local development and observability, so everyone ships faster

Where the Other 20% Goes

• Design: write short design docs for significant changes and review the ones your teammates write
• Mentoring: grow the engineers around you through pairing, reviews and example, not status meetings
• Planning: work with product managers and designers to break work into small, shippable pieces, and flag technical risk and cost early
• Hiring: take part in interview loops, including the coding rounds
• Cross-team work: align with mobile, platform and data engineers on shared APIs and engineering standards

What We’re Looking For

Required skills

• 6+ years writing production code across frontend and backend, with significant time on high-traffic, consumer-facing systems. You still write code most days.
• Deep, current expertise in TypeScript (Node.js) and React/Next.js. You can take a feature from an empty file to production on your own.
• Go experience, or the ability to pick it up quickly: several of our existing services are written in Go
• Strong backend design skills: microservice architectures, API design (REST/gRPC), service boundaries, inter-service communication and data modelling
• Hands-on experience with AWS and containerised deployments, and with databases and search such as MySQL, PostgreSQL, OpenSearch, Elasticsearch and Redis, including data modelling, performance tuning and caching
• Solid web performance skills: server-side rendering, caching, bundle size and Core Web Vitals
• Testing discipline across unit, integration and end-to-end tests
• Production ownership: observability, SLOs, debugging live incidents and writing post-mortems that lead to real fixes
• A track record of technical leadership from inside the codebase: driving design decisions, setting review standards and mentoring engineers
• Clear written communication in design docs, pull requests and trade-off discussions with engineers and product partners

Nice to have

• Experience building AI/LLM-backed features in production, including managing the latency, quality and cost of model calls
• Fluent use of AI coding assistants in your daily workflow, with the judgement to review what they produce
• Experience with event-driven architectures, edge computing (such as CDN-level logic) or multi-region systems
• Experience with SEO-critical web applications, internationalisation and right-to-left (Arabic) layouts
• Experience in marketplace, classifieds, or other two-sided platform products

How You Work

• You lead by building: the team follows your code, designs and reviews, not your title
• You ship small and often, and you’d rather prove an idea with a prototype than debate it in a meeting
• You own outcomes in production, not just merged pull requests, and you watch the dashboards after a release
• You protect the quality bar in code review and production, while keeping the team shipping
• You’re pragmatic: you know when to invest in scale and when to ship the simple thing, and you can quantify the cost of both
• You make decisions with data and explain trade-offs clearly