Freelance- Lead Developer- Technical Lead

Lead Developer / Technical Lead - Freelance

AI-Enabled Product & Data Platform 

Hands-on engineering lead to turn a mature R&D prototype into a secure, reusable, production-ready product platform. 

Role Details 

Role Overview 

We are seeking a senior, hands-on technical lead to assume ownership of an existing product codebase and lead its transition from R&D prototype to production-ready platform. The role will contribute code from day one, own application architecture and delivery standards, and coordinate a second developer focused on the shared data and intelligence layer. The successful candidate will work across product, data, cloud, QA, security and UX to deliver a secure, scalable first release and establish the foundation for future modules. 

Key Responsibilities 

• Assess the current codebase, environments and contracts, then lead the transition from prototype to a secure, maintainable product. 

• Design and build the reusable platform core, including the API/BFF layer, operational database, tenant/client/event model, roles, permissions, entitlements, configuration, audit and usage telemetry. 

• Remain hands-on across React/TypeScript front-end development, Python/FastAPI services, AWS infrastructure, integrations and automated testing. 

• Define versioned APIs and data contracts between the product platform and the shared data/intelligence layer, including backward-compatibility rules. 

• Provide day-to-day technical oversight to the data-platform developer and coordinate data products, AI tools, evidence/lineage outputs, schema changes and release dependencies. 

• Enforce client and event-level isolation, anonymized data handling, secure access, auditability and governed AI outputs. 

• Establish engineering standards for code review, CI/CD, infrastructure as code, observability, quality gates, security and release management. 

• Maintain concise architecture documentation using UML/PlantUML and Architecture Decision Records, while mentoring and unblocking additional developers as the team grows. 

• Use generative AI to accelerate implementation, testing, documentation and refactoring while maintaining human review and secure engineering controls. 

Technical Environment 

Required Experience 

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, including 3+ years in a lead developer, technical lead or hands-on architecture role. 

• Strong full-stack capability across modern React/TypeScript applications and Python/FastAPI services. 

• Production experience with AWS, infrastructure as code, CI/CD, observability, secrets management and secure identity patterns. 

• Experience with PostgreSQL and Snowflake or a comparable cloud data platform.