Team Lead, Engineering

Altana is the network for trusted trade. Our AI-powered product network empowers governments and businesses to build a more resilient and secure global economy while keeping trade flowing.

The Opportunity at Altana

The Engineering organization is responsible for building the product that brings this vision to life. We are creating a platform fundamentally driven by AI, which scales to a massive trove of data, and a diverse customer base; it is a complex system that will stretch engineering in many directions.

The best teams here ship work customers come to rely on, and that takes a particular kind of engineering practice. It means starting inside the customer's workflow rather than at the ticket. It means treating every release as a hypothesis you can prove or disprove. It means reaching for AI as a primary building block, not a feature you bolt on at the end. And it means owning a product end‑to‑end, from the first conversation through product launch.

As a Team Lead at Altana, you'll lead a small team of 3–4 engineers in delivering this work to customers.. You'll embed with product and design, make the day-to-day product and technical calls, and turn hypotheses about where the real pain is into shipped, adopted products. This is an engineering role first: leading the team adds to your own engineering leverage rather than replacing it. Your success is measured the same way the team's is: by the value it delivers to customers, how quickly and steadily it ships, and how well its systems hold up as output grows.

You Will

• Ship, and set the technical bar. Hands-on engineering is a large share of this role. Own the team's architecture and quality standards, and be the last line of defense before work reaches customers.

• Own the problem, not just the ticket. Define the customer problem in your own words before choosing a solution, make the tactical product calls, and own a metric tied to a customer outcome.

• Go to the customer every week. Get on calls, review session recordings, and be able to name the top three friction points in your area at any moment.

• Turn ambiguity into a plan. Clarify goals before committing, break unclear problems into milestones and MVP/GA releases, manage the backlog, and sequence work so a small team makes steady, predictable progress.

• Build AI-native, and verify it. Treat LLMs, agents, evals, and retrieval as standard building blocks. Own the standard for how AI-assisted code is verified before it ships.

• Keep the team moving fast. Track velocity with our shared engineering metrics, find bottlenecks, push to pay down operational debt, and raise cross-team gaps with leadership.

• Own what you run. Lead the team's incident response, including a quick-response escalation rotation. Treat cost as a design input, and when you spot a cost anomaly, flag it along with a proposed fix. Uphold our security standards in code review and fix flagged vulnerabilities quickly.

• Show the work. Demo what the team builds directly to customers, our commercial team, and product and engineering leadership.

• Help your teammates grow. Coach a few engineers, write reviews, and partner with your engineering manager on timely, actionable feedback. Interview candidates, and help build a team where everyone's ideas are heard.

You Have

• Real-world professional experience writing back end or data-driven software in demanding environments.

• Strong hands-on engineering skills and sound technical judgment. You've deployed production code to cloud environments, and you know when a design needs more input and how to get it.

• Experience coaching, mentoring, and leading other engineers on complex projects, as a tech lead, project lead, or senior engineer driving a team effort.

• A track record of staying close to customers, turning their problems into well-scoped, shipped work, and delivering incremental releases from prototype to production.

• Experience running sprint planning and delivery for a team that consistently hits its commitments.

• Comfort with operations, including incidents, on-call, and system cost.

• Strong written and verbal communication skills, and good judgment about when to make a call yourself and when to escalate.

• Experience building production systems with LLMs, agents, evals, or retrieval.

Nice to have, but not required

• Experience directly managing engineers.

• Experience using engineering metrics such as DORA or SPACE to improve how a team works.

• Background in trade, supply chain, compliance, or working with government customers.

This role is based in Brooklyn, NY, USA with hybrid work flexibility and candidates must be within commuting distance from our Williamsburg, Brooklyn officeUS Salary Range and Benefits

$230,000 - $270,000 USD

The salary range, to the extent specified for this role, is a good faith statement of the minimum and maximum levels of the annual based salary for the position. The base salary offered to a successful candidate will depend on a wide range of compensation factors, including, but not limited to, work experience, education and/or training, critical skills, and/or business considerations. Competitive equity grants are included in the majority of full time offers; and are considered part of Altana's total compensation package. Altana also offers either a discretionary bonus or a variable compensation plan depending on the role. Additionally, Altana offers top-tier benefits for full-time employees, including:

• Flexible Time Off: Altana operates with a Flexible Time Off (FTO) policy that gives you agency over your own time off so you can maximize your work-life balance.

• Parental Leave: We offer industry leading Paid Parental Leave (PPL), providing 14 weeks of leave for non-birthing, adoptive, and foster parents and up to 26 weeks of leave for birthing parents, all paid at 100% of your base salary.

• Health Benefits: We have a full suite of medical, vision, and dental benefits with generous employer contributions, designed to give you flexibility and choice for your individual health situation. Our high deductible health plan is 100% employer paid for employees and supplemented with an employer contribution to your Health Savings Account (HSA). There is also a Flexible Spending Account (FSA) option.

• Supplemental Benefits: Altana provides life, short- and long-term disability, and AD&D insurance coverage, all at no cost to you, so you know that you and your loved ones are covered in case of an emergency.

• 401(k) Savings: Save for and invest in your future using our Fidelity 401(k) retirement savings program.

• Commuter Benefits: Save money on your commute by setting aside pre-tax funds for public transit or parking!

• Wellness: Because we value mental and emotional health, every Altana employee has access to a free premium subscription to Calm, the #1 app for meditation, sleep, and mindfulness.

• Pet Insurance: Pets are family too! Keep them healthy with Wishbone insurance and / or our Total Pet vet service and telehealth discount plan.

• Employee Assistance Program: Free access to confidential personal support.

• Dependent Care FSA: You will have access to a Dependent Care FSA, which allows you to set aside pre-tax funds for childcare expenses

The recruiter assigned to this role can share more information about the specific compensation and benefit details associated with this role during the hiring process.

Our Values

Our values are the core beliefs that shape who we are, what we stand for, and how we behave.They form the foundation of Altana’s culture and integrity and guide how we hire, design, build, and connect with each other and our customers.

• Trust: Our customers and partners entrust us with missions of the highest importance. We honor that by keeping our word, meeting commitments, and ensuring every action we take reinforces confidence in us. We rely on each other to deliver, to speak openly, and to hold ourselves accountable.

• Resilience: In a world of uncertainty and complexity, our work must withstand challenges, evolve with conditions, and ensure reliability over time. Resilience is both how we operate and what we deliver. It’s how we respond when things don’t go to plan –– we adapt, we support each other, and we keep moving forward.

• Stewardship: We are stewards of every mission we touch. Because our work impacts lives and futures, we hold ourselves accountable to delivering mission impact and never compromising. Our responsibility extends beyond individual projects to the broader system of global trade. We believe that stewardship starts from within so that we can bring focus, creativity, and excellence to our work. Each of us is personally responsible for fostering a workplace where people can thrive. And we are stewards of the greater good of the company. By holding ourselves and each other accountable, we build a culture of innovation and collective success that reflects the scale of our mission.

• Courage: Courage is what unlocks the seemingly impossible for our customers. It’s the core value that drives us make bold moves and take on big, complicated network problems—the ones others avoid. We know success isn't guaranteed, but we have the audacious vision to believe a solution is possible and to build it. Courage fuels our growth mindset. It means embracing challenges that make us stronger, and it’s demonstrated by how we approach hard conversations and complex projects.

At Altana, we believe that a diverse workforce enables greater creativity, performance, and adaptability. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and welcome you to join us as you are. Our employment opportunities and decisions are based on business needs and individual qualifications, without regard to race, color, religious creed, national origin, ancestry, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, marital status, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, genetic information, family care or medical leave status, military or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by the laws or regulations in the areas in which we operate. We prohibit discrimination and harassment of any type, in any situation.

Offers related to employment at Altana will come from an Altana.ai email address. We will never ask for payment as part of the interview or onboarding process.