Author: Daniel Bircher
Created: 2026-08-28
Job Title: Development Team Lead
Location: Kosovo
Terms: Full-time
Salary: DOE
About the role:
We are seeking a Development Team Lead to establish and grow our software development function in Kosovo. This is a hands-on position: the person in this role writes production code every day while leading a small team of developers building and maintaining the multiple internal applications our audit and recovery operations run on. Requirements and implementation guidance come from senior technical staff in the United States; this role turns that direction into working software, allocates and tracks the work, and reviews it for quality before it returns for final approval. Because the Kosovo workday overlaps the United States by only a few hours, it demands sound independent judgment, disciplined written communication, and the ability to keep a team productive without waiting on answers. This is the first development hire at this site and a build-and-own role: the process, the standards, and eventually the team itself are shaped by whoever takes it. Over time the position is expected to develop deep understanding of our business domain and take increasing ownership of solution design. It reports to the Senior Software Engineer in the United States, within a SOC 2 Type II-compliant environment.
Responsibilities
- Write production code daily across multiple internal applications; this is an engineering role that leads, not a management role that observes.
- Translate requirements and implementation guidance from U.S. technical leadership into scheduled, assigned, executable work for the team.
- Review all team code for correctness, consistency, and adherence to established architecture before it is submitted for final approval in the United States.
- Keep developers unblocked during the hours U.S. staff are offline, making and documenting reasonable decisions where guidance is incomplete rather than stalling work.
- Define and maintain the delivery process jointly with U.S. technical leadership: work intake, task tracking, code review, testing, and handoff.
- Maintain visible, current status on all in-flight work, so ownership, progress, and deadlines can be reviewed at a glance from the United States.
- Raise scope, risk, and timeline concerns early, paired with a recommended course of action rather than the problem alone.
- Learn the company's existing in-house application framework and shared libraries, and improve their documentation so future developers ramp faster.
- Grow the Kosovo development team: source and interview candidates and lead first-round technical evaluation, with hiring decisions made jointly with U.S. leadership.
- Mentor developers through code review and hands-on coaching, raising the technical standard of the team over time.
- Build working knowledge of the recovery audit business domain, progressing from executing defined work toward owning solution design.
- Follow and help enforce change management and release practices consistent with a SOC 2 Type II environment.
Minimum Requirements:
- 7+ years of professional software development experience.
- Strong PHP and MySQL experience in a LAMP environment, including performance-conscious SQL against large datasets.
- 2+ years leading or coordinating a small development team, including allocating work and reviewing the code of others.
- Demonstrated ability to work productively within an existing codebase and architecture rather than rebuilding to personal preference.
- Experience working with a distributed team across a significant time-zone gap and limited daily overlap.
- Sound escalation judgment: knows which questions must go upstream and which can be reasonably decided, documented, and moved past.
- Excellent written English, sufficient to document decisions, write clear task descriptions, and hold technical discussions asynchronously without loss of context.
- Front-end fundamentals in JavaScript, HTML, and CSS sufficient to work across the full stack.
- Version control discipline with Git, including branching strategy and code review workflow.
- Ability to prioritize by business impact and hold a team to committed timelines.
Proficiency in English, written and verbal.
Preferred (Not Required):
- Experience at a software development agency or outsourcing firm, particularly delivering for U.S. or Western European clients.
- Track record of hiring and growing a development team from a small base.
- Experience working within a custom or in-house application framework rather than only mainstream frameworks.
- Familiarity with modern PHP frameworks such as Laravel, and experience adopting one incrementally alongside existing code.
- Background in enterprise data, finance, accounting, or audit domains.
- Experience modernizing legacy applications while keeping them in production.
- Linux server administration, deployment automation, or CI/CD pipelines.
- Familiarity with search platforms such as Solr or OpenSearch.
- Experience with reporting, ETL, or large-scale data processing workflows.
- SOC 2, ISO 27001, or similar audited control environments.
All interested candidates can apply using the button below.
