Tech Lead

About the role

About Kavak

As the first Mexican unicorn, with a presence in several countries and an AI-first business model, Kavak is redefining the used car market and the experience of millions of users in LatAm. We have been one of the most highly valued companies in the region and recently closed a USD $300M investment round led by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the largest investments they have made in Latin America. With this growth, we are excited to add people who will help us build the next chapter of our product and take our efforts to build with artificial intelligence to the next level.

We build with AI across our core operation: from conversational commerce, to generative marketing, to systems that extract insights from millions of interactions. We are a team that imagines the impossible, builds it, and lives disruption, proactivity, and ambition in a hypergrowth context.

About the role

As Tech Lead in our new development team in Brazil, you will build the technology that powers Kavak’s processes in the country. The Purchasing platform is already live and you will keep it running, develop the Sales platform, and make sure everything reaches production. You will also start Car Journey from scratch, with a focus on the customer lifecycle.

You will lead a team of 5 engineers across Brazil and Argentina, report to the Senior Engineering Manager, and stay hands-on. You will help develop/customize core services, create localized tools and bring our AI harness from Mexico to Brazil and build specialized agents that fulfill what each customer wants to do (buy, sell, get a loan, renegotiate), with a personalized agent for every customer.

Responsibilities Technical leadership and architecture

- Own the quality of the code and architecture the team produces.

- Design solution architectures and be able to explain what was built at a low level of detail.

- Make critical technical decisions that shape product direction and business results.

- Keep AI as a core component of the design.

Team leadership

- Coordinate a team of 5 engineers located in Brazil and Argentina.

- Stay hands-on, writing code alongside the team.

- Foster a culture of high ownership, where the team decides what to build and how, instead of just closing tickets.

Product and business impact

- Align with Product and Business teams on the roadmap of our applications.

- Negotiate priorities, backlog, and scope with Product and Business.

- Take Purchasing, Sales, and Car Journey from roadmap to production.

Requirements - 7+ years of experience in software engineering.

- Professional experience with Java or Go

- Strong backend experience with microservices and APIs.

- Experience designing solution architectures.

- Experience coordinating technology teams.

- Strong negotiation skills, including negotiating backlog with Product.