R&D Team Lead, Infrastructure Modernization

Yotpo helps brands turn first-time shoppers into lifelong customers through reviews and loyalty.
As we modernize the UGC Product House into a scalable, self-serve platform, our infrastructure becomes a critical priority. If you’re passionate about technical leadership, engineering excellence, people growth, and driving modernization across multiple teams, this could be your dream job.

We are seeking an R&D Team Lead to drive technical modernization, improve developer experience, and elevate engineering quality across the UGC Product House. In this role, you will lead an engineering team, shape the modernization roadmap, and work closely with Experience Teams to enable fast, scalable, and reliable product value delivery across the UGC Product House.
This position blends people leadership, architectural direction, and hands-on technical contribution, while working in close partnership with Yotpo’s Infra teams and technical leadership to shape the future foundations of the UGC platform.

• →Modernization Roadmap & Planning: Define and align the modernization roadmap for the UGC Product House, ensuring clear prioritization, stakeholder communication, and strong collaboration with engineering and product partners.
• →Team Leadership & Coaching: Lead the Infrastructure Modernization Team, providing mentorship, fostering technical growth, and shaping a high-performing engineering culture.
• →Embedded Execution Model: Ensure the team successfully embeds within Experience Teams to execute modernization initiatives and architectural consistency, while promoting knowledge transfer.
• →Hands-on Technical Contribution: Actively contribute to complex design, architectural work, POCs, and infrastructure modernization through consistent hands-on execution.
• →Engineering Standards & Best Practices: Define, promote, and enforce engineering standards across the Product House, raising quality in areas such as scalability, reliability, performance, and maintainability.
• →Reliability & Stability Enablement: Partner with Experience Teams to support and nurture long-term resilience and stability initiatives and culture.
• →Developer Experience & Velocity: Drive improvements in tooling, CI/CD, observability, testing, and AI-assisted workflows to increase engineering velocity and reduce operational friction.
• →Strategic Alignment: Ensure modernization efforts and infrastructure investments support the UGC strategic focus.
• →Stakeholder Collaboration: Work closely with engineering, product, design, data, and cross-PH stakeholders to gather input, align priorities, and maintain transparency across teams.
• →Cross-R&D Initiatives & Leadership Forums: Participate in R&D-wide leadership forums, contributing to cross-organizational decisions, knowledge sharing, and long-term engineering direction.

• Experience & Leadership: 8+ years as a senior backend, platform, or infrastructure engineer, with at least 2 years leading engineers or driving cross-team technical initiatives.
• Modernization Expertise: Proven track record of leading modernization, replatforming, or large-scale technical transformation efforts in high-scale environments.
• Architectural Strength: Deep understanding of distributed systems, service architectures, and scalable backend design, with the ability to define and communicate architectural direction.
• Reliability & Stability Focus: Experience improving performance, reliability, operational hygiene, and reducing production noise across complex systems.
• Developer Experience Mindset: Passion for improving developer workflows, internal tooling, CI/CD pipelines, observability, and engineering velocity.
• Coaching & Mentorship: Strong ability to mentor senior engineers, elevate technical thinking, and create an environment that encourages growth and ownership.
• Collaboration & Influence: Excellent communication and stakeholder management skills, with the ability to influence without authority and align multiple teams.
• Strategic Problem-Solving: A long-term thinker able to balance modernization priorities with product needs, making pragmatic, data-informed decisions.
• Quality-Driven Approach: Deep commitment to maintainability, security, performance, and overall engineering excellence.

• Backend & Architecture: Expertise in Java/Kotlin, Node.js, Ruby on Rails, or similar technologies, with strong system design and architecture capabilities.
• Cloud & Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, CI/CD systems, and cloud-native operational practices.
• Data & Messaging: Familiarity with MySQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, and event-driven or streaming architectures.
• Observability & Reliability: Strong understanding of logging, metrics, tracing, alerting, and resilience patterns.
• Developer Tooling: Experience with internal platforms, automation, quality gates, static analysis, and workflow/tooling improvements.
• AI-Assisted Development: Familiarity with GitHub Copilot, LLM APIs, and AI-driven developer acceleration workflows.