Engineering Team Lead (Systems Architecture & Platform Development)

Location: Hybrid – Ann Arbor Office + Remote Work

About the Role

As we scale toward the next phase of growth, we’re hiring a Team Lead who brings both architect-level technical depth and hands-on engineering leadership to a cross-functional team building tightly integrated hardware/software systems. Currently, this position would report to the Chief Executive Officer.

This is a rare opportunity to help shape the architecture, reliability, and execution rhythms of a platform where latency matters, uptime is non-negotiable, and the real world interacts with the cloud in milliseconds.

Logistical Details

This is a full-time, salaried position eligible for all company-sponsored benefits, including Unlimited PTO and company contributions for medical, dental, and vision healthcare plans.

Our ideal candidate would be local to the Ann Arbor or Greater Metro Detroit area and available to commute to our office space in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where we are headquartered. While we have a hybrid office policy, we would expect this position to spend time in the office weekly in coordination with the CEO.

Some infrequent travel may be required for relevant conferences, product launches, or other regional opportunities.

Our ideal candidate would be able to start immediately.

Role Responsibilities

Scorbit is a seed-stage startup and as such has an engineering team that is both local and distributed, with both full-time and contract engineers. This position would manage all software development in the organization, including front-end, back-end, embedded, cloud/distributed and web-based engineering projects. As part of the project management responsibilities, this position would review active projects, assign or prioritize tasks and sprints, and report on progress to management.

In addition, the role would be expected to also contribute and collaborate significantly to the architectural planning and directly contribute to the code base. This position will also be collaborating closely with the Chief Strategy Officer, VP of Hardware and Product on a regular basis, ensuring the infrastructure plan is aligned with strategy.

We expect this role to be about 50% leadership, and 50% engineering/coding work. 

Technical Leadership & Architecture

• Serve as Scorbit’s systems architect for a distributed, low-latency, high-availability platform spanning IoT hardware, cloud services, and user apps.
• Lead the design and evolution of the architecture supporting our real-time scoring engine, messaging and queue technologies, mobile/web APIs, and device provisioning flows.
• Make core decisions around data modeling, service boundaries, reliability engineering, performance optimization, security and scalability.
• Lead threat modeling, architectural documentation, and long-term platform roadmap planning.

Team Management & Execution

• Lead a multidisciplinary engineering team across backend, mobile, firmware, and frontend.
• Accountable for reporting and tracking of agile projects to management on a weekly basis, using tools such as  Linear/Jira.
• Help to create and enforce engineering best practices—code review, Git flow, CI/CD, testing, documentation, and incident response.
• Mentor engineers, support career growth, and promote a healthy, collaborative engineering culture.
• Remember to have a good time along the way. We’re a pinball company, after all.

Hands-On Engineering

• Contribute significant work on backend, devops, and platform services.
• Build and maintain cloud-based infrastructure, including elements on Cloudflare, AWS, Google Cloud, and bare metal, focusing on reliability, cost visibility, observability, and scalability.
• Improve CI/CD workflows (GitHub Actions), monitoring, alerting, and operational excellence.

Experience Required

Architectural & Systems Expertise

• Experience designing and running complex distributed systems with high availability and low latency.
• Deep familiarity with event-driven architectures, message buses, real-time streaming, and high-volume data processing.
• Strong understanding of AWS services and modern infrastructure-as-code patterns.
• Experience with Redis, Postgres, Django/ORM, and scalable API design.

Software Engineering & DevOps

• Senior-level coding skills in a minimum of Python.
• Strong experience with CI/CD, GitHub Actions, secret management, and deployment pipelines.
• Comfortable with APM and error discovery systems such as Sentry
• Comfortable managing and engineering automated builds and testing with various tools such as Fastlane, Firebase, Testflight
• Practical experience with monitoring tools (Elastic/Kibana, Prometheus/Grafana) and incident management.

Leadership

• Led teams of diverse competencies (backend, frontend, firmware, mobile).
• Experience with agile methodology, managing execution, and driving accountability.
• Ability to communicate clearly with engineers, executives, product owners, and partners.
• Comfortable with early-stage ambiguity and pragmatic prioritization.

Nice to Have

• Familiarity with mobile codebases and frameworks (Kotlin, Kotlin Multiplatform/Jetbrains, Swift/SwiftUI, Firebase, Testflight).
• Startup experience, especially in hardware/cloud environments.

Why Scorbit?

• Work on a platform where every millisecond matters and success is measured in mean-time-to-fun
• Shape the architecture of a system that merges IoT devices, cloud analytics, mobile apps, and real-time entertainment.
• Join a small, senior team where your technical decisions have immediate impact.
• Help us scale from thousands to tens of thousands of connected machines and beyond.
• Competitive compensation, equity, and the chance to build something fans genuinely love.

Interested in working with us? Please send your resume to [email protected] and we’ll be in touch if there’s a fit.