Rapid Product Development Team Lead

Ghent

For a brand-new engineering team, iText is looking for a player/coach to make this team excel in bringing new products to market quickly, while balancing delivery time with sound architectural and technological choices for future development and maintenance. Using iText’s strong PDF technology as a foundation, this team will be responsible to build innovative new products.

The current product set of iText enables developers to integrate, in an automated and programmatic way, document creation, processing and data extraction into their products, processes and services. Expect to work with AI and ML technologies, apply NLP techniques, develop for mobile platforms, and explore other interesting areas to augment iText’s products and technology.

What you’ll do

As a player/coach, you combine the team lead role with hands-on technical work (roughly 50/50).
You play a crucial role in building and managing the team. You motivate your colleagues and grow new leaders in your team.
You define processes and structures to enable efficient collaboration. You lead argument-based discussions within your team and also across teams, maintaining good relationship with your colleagues, and ensure those interactions result in taking optimal decisions.
You work closely with the Product, Research and Engineering teams.
You are a sounding board for the technical experts to validate ideas and technical decisions.
You manage resources and timelines to commit and deliver. You have a constant feedback loop with your manager, both about your team’s work and yours, but also giving feedback from your side. You make sure the agreements you make with your manager get implemented.
You lead a team of up to 5 people, ensuing delivery of the agreed upon plans by both being involved on the technical level (code reviews, architecture discussions, making sure your team is free of any impediments), and on the people management level (1-1s, performance reviews, career development plans).

What you bring

10+ years of experience in software engineering; 4+ years of experience with Java and/or C#
3+ years of which in a leading role
Desire to find most pragmatic and beneficial (on the effort/result ratio) points of improvement in team processes and code base, generating brilliant ideas on approaching those, and taking the lead in execution
Broad technological background and experience with various technologies; experience with documents or document management is a plus.
Experience in designing the architecture for large projects/products from scratch
Organizational talent, strong critical thinking, and pragmatic problem-solving skills
Excellent communication skills

You will thrive in this role if ...

You have a strong software engineering background, with a Bachelor’s degree in computer science, or equivalent through experience
You are well-versed in enterprise development
You enjoy algorithmic work to improve efficiency and performance
You have the ability to act in an agile way, without having all the information available, and you are able to manage uncertainty
You keep up to date with technological developments, like to apply them in real world contexts, and follow through on their practical application
You work well in distributed, remote, varied teams
You are able to coach and manage a team to deliver excellent results

(Y)our team

Beside being part of our iText family, you’ll also be part of a brand new engineering team. At iText we attach great importance to team play. We often hold team events and host a kickoff event every year with all international staff to ensure our entire team has time to get to know each other.

What we promise you

Ample learning opportunities (not only in PDF technologies), this role is a great way to learn and grow your technology and coaching skills,
an international atmosphere,
great team diversity,
rewarding compensation packages, and
a fun work environment!