Tech Lead — Users & Auth

We're looking for a Tech Lead to be the senior technical authority for our Users & Auth team — the systems that define how users exist and move within Clara's platform: authentication, authorization, identity, and access control. This is a hands-on Builder role, not a people-management one: you lead by building. Your PRs, your architecture docs, and your reviews are what the team calibrates to. You'll set the technical direction and work hand in hand with product on the definitions and priorities that shape the team's work — you're not the product owner, but you bring enough product sense to push back, give strong signal, and help decide what's worth building. The work is invisible when it's done right and critical when it's not, and some of Clara's biggest bets run straight through it.

We move fast and trust our leads to own outcomes end-to-end. That means autonomy to make decisions, proactivity to surface problems before they become blockers, and the attitude to push initiatives across the finish line without waiting to be told what to do.

Your responsibilities will include:

• Owning architecture and system design within your team's domain — tech stack, API contracts, data models, and infrastructure. You hold the architecture call for your systems, and you stay hands-on writing code
• Owning the team's execution rhythm — sprint planning, standups, backlog grooming, retros — and being accountable for velocity: PR cycle time, deploy frequency, and healthy WIP
• Setting and holding engineering excellence — code review standards, test coverage, and proactive management of technical debt
• Unblocking the team day to day through code reviews, design reviews, pairing, and debugging
• Owning product specs from the technical lens — reviewing them before work starts, flagging feasibility gaps and complexity, and spotting where AI tooling can close what would otherwise be a quarter of engineering
• Owning system health for the services you own: security posture, scalability, performance, and availability

Who you are

• 6+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record as the senior technical voice on a team (Staff+ level). This is a technical leadership role, not people management — career development and performance sit with a Director, so you can stay focused on the technical bar
• A hands-on Builder — still deep in the systems, setting the standard through your own PRs, architecture docs, and reviews, not through oversight
• Strong architecture and system-design judgment in a complex domain
• Strong product sense — you work well with product partners, give sharp feedback on definitions and priorities, and can weigh in on what to build and why
• Full-stack engineering with your strength on the backend. We work primarily in Java and Spring on the backend and React on the frontend — depth in those is a plus, but we care more about strong fundamentals and how fast you ramp than about years in any one stack
• Working knowledge of auth, identity, and security best practices — Auth0 exposure is a plus
• The most fluent AI user in the room — you model AI-native engineering day to day and actively find where AI tooling closes product gaps. At Clara, AI is part of how we work, not a side topic
• English proficiency, with the ability to lead technical discussions across geographies

We've kept this list short on purpose — these are the things that actually matter. If you check most of these and the rest you'd close with curiosity and the right tools, we want to hear from you.