Lead Software Engineer (Team Lead) - 2 squads

You will lead one of two squads that run C Teleport’s most business-critical domains; and as we scale, we’re hiring a Lead for each. This is a leadership role with two halves that come together in one person: you own the technical direction of your squad and stay hands-on in the code, and you own the people. You build the team, grow it, and are accountable for how everyone in it performs.

At C Teleport we are transforming corporate travel by combining automation, machine learning and pragmatic engineering. As a squad Lead, you are your squad’s connection to the wider company; the technical counterpart to your squad’s Product Owner, who is also based in our Rotterdam office, and a trusted partner to the teams whose work depends on yours. The two squads that you’ll lead one

Billing Squad: invoicing, payments, reconciliation, VAT and revenue recognition across multiple jurisdictions. It sits at the intersection of travel, finance and engineering, and its work is felt directly on the company’s revenue.

Back Office, Integration & Ecosystem Squad: the integration layer that connects C Teleport to the software our customers already run, plus the APIs and ecosystem surface through which outside systems, and increasingly AI tools, plug into the platform. The mission: make data flow automatically so manual re-keying disappears. What you’ll own (both squads)Technical leadership

• Own the squad’s technical direction, from design decisions through to the implementation itself.
• Own the squad’s delivery outcomes to ensure the team ships reliable, complete solutions and follows through to production.
• Stay hands-on: contribute production code, lead reviews, and know the system deeply.
• Partner with the Product Owner to shape the roadmap and break work into incremental MVPs, shaping solutions, not accepting requirements blindly.
• Challenge estimates, surface risks early, safeguard production stability, and keep incidents and support tickets inside SLA.
• Enforce coding standards, reduce technical debt, and evaluate new technology with the Architects Group.

People leadership

• Line-manage the engineers in the squad: this is real, all-round people management, not a title.
• Own hiring for the squad: define the need, interview, and make the call.
• Run regular 1:1s, give direct feedback, and build each engineer’s growth path.
• Own performance end-to-end: recognise and stretch strong performers, and address underperformance directly, including the difficult conversations and, where it comes to it, managing someone out.
• Set and hold the bar for how the squad works together, and promote a culture of “agree or disagree, but commit.”

This is not…

• Not a hands-off management role. You will still design, review, and write production code every week.
• Not a pure IC or architect role. You are accountable for people and for delivery, not only for the code. If you are looking to step back from management, or to step back from coding, this is not the role., C#, .NET, PostgreSQL, RabbitMQ, AWS; alongside Docker, Redis, Elasticsearch and other supporting services across the wider platform. The squad

Each is a small, focused team working remotely across European time zones, with you connecting it to the wider company from our Rotterdam office. You report to the CTO and work alongside a Tech Lead. What we offer

• A hands-on technical leadership role with significant ownership of a business-critical domain.
• Hybrid working from our Rotterdam office, three days a week; close to your Product Owner and the people whose work depends on the squad, so the tightest collaboration happens in person.
• Professional growth in a fast-moving company at the intersection of travel, finance and engineering.

• 7+ years in software engineering with deep .NET / C# expertise.
• 2+ years leading engineers as a Team Lead / EM, with genuine appetite for the full people-management responsibilities above.
• Strong hands-on coding background, you’d rather write code than avoid it.
• Experienced with modern AI-assisted and agentic engineering tools, and able to use them effectively in day-to-day engineering and team management.
• Solid grasp of architectural patterns, SOLID, TDD, DDD, Event Sourcing and CQRS; practical experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred) and message brokers (RabbitMQ or similar); hands-on with microservices and Docker.
• Based in the Netherlands and able to work from our Rotterdam office 3 days per week. (We can sponsor highly-skilled-migrant candidates already in, or relocating to, the NL; we do not relocate candidates currently based outside the country.)

Nice to have (bonus, genuinely not required)

• For Billing: billing, invoicing, payments, ERP integration or other finance-related products; familiarity with VAT/GST, accounting principles or revenue recognition.
• For Back Office / Integration & Ecosystem: building and owning APIs, webhooks, or platform/integration products; connecting to enterprise finance/HR/scheduling systems; driving external partner/supplier integrations to live deployment.
• Experience with AWS or Kubernetes.

Tech stack