Dev Team Leader

Full-time – Remote (U.S.)   •   Salaried, based on experience.

PeopleCor builds workforce management and payroll software for large forward-thinking dairy operations across the entire country. Our clients and their employees depend on what we ship. Correctness isn’t a feature, it’s the product. An incorrect paycheck or missed tax filing isn’t simply a bug ticket; it’s real damage to an operation that trusts us. We’re a small, deliberate team that moves fast but refuses to be sloppy where it counts, and this role exists to own and hold that standard.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who sets the engineering bar and holds it – not a senior individual-contributor seat with a title bump. You’ll lead our development team day-to-day: own how well the work gets built, make the architecture calls, run the team’s process (including Scrum), drive delivery, and grow the developers around you into a team that holds its own standard. The founder owns product priority and the roadmap – what we build and when; you own that what ships is sound and that the team ships it well.

You’ll stay close to the code – enough to lead credibly and jump in on hard problems – without carrying a full individual-contributor workload. It takes someone technical enough to earn the team’s respect, mature enough to hold a standard against pushback from people they like, and pragmatic enough to know when to ship and when to stop the line – because with payroll, the judgment is in knowing the difference. You become the technical anchor and standard-bearer for the team, and build the engineering discipline that lets PeopleCor ship reliably and scale.

• Continuous iteration and enforcement of the engineering standard and Definition of Done. Both already exist – you keep them current and hold the team to them.
• Architecture and technical design decisions. When the team is split, you make the call.
• The code review process and ticket assignment – ensure code review flows, assign who builds and who reviews each ticket, keep coverage adequate, and drive rework and kickbacks down. Code review is shared across the team; you’re the final say on quality.
• The QA process – how work moves from built to verified and the gates before release. You direct it; you don’t run the testing. Push the team toward more automated coverage, payroll regression first.
• Security upkeep on a cadence – code and dependency reviews, periodic audits, staying current on patches. You hold the cadence rather than running every audit.
• Release readiness and deployment – you hold the deploy gate and the go / no-go on what ships to production.
• The team’s Scrum process and delivery health – sprint planning, estimation, standups, Jira board flow, and unblocking developers so delivery keeps moving.
• Developer growth and AI-tooling adoption – mentor and level up a distributed team with first-line accountability for performance and standards, and push the team to use AI tooling to widen review and QA coverage.
  

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You and the team win when the team ships reliably to a high standard and holds that standard without escalation.

• Technical decisions and standard-setting happen confidently within the team, without escalation.
• Code review coverage improves, rework and kickbacks trend down, and cycle time and code review-dwell / QA-dwell trend down.
• Releases ship on schedule without quality regressions; payroll-correctness incidents stay at or near zero.
• QA coverage and a regular security cadence are established and held.
• Developers are visibly growing, and the Dev Team holds its own standard.

• You own how it’s built and how well: the quality bar, architecture, what “done” means, how review works, the Scrum process, and the deploy go / no-go – without waiting on the founder.
• The founder owns product priority, scope, and sequencing as Product Owner – what we build and when. You push back hard when priority and technical reality conflict, but that call is the founder’s.
• You own the technical assessment in dev hiring and firing; the founder makes the final call.
  

You may be a fit if you:

• Have actually led developers and raised the team’s bar – not just been the strongest individual contributor in the room.

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• Set engineering standards and hold them against pushback, including from people you like.
• Are technical enough to earn respect and make the architecture call with confidence.
• Can run Scrum and keep a small, distributed team aligned across time zones.
• Know when to hold the line on quality and when ‘good’ can ship – and can tell the difference if payroll is on the table.
• Build processes while delivering live work, and actually use the processes you build.
• Use AI development tooling well and are eager to push it further.
• Close the loop – no half-finished sprints, no standards that quietly erode.
• Bonus: Spanish fluency, given you’ll be leading a Spanish-speaking development team.

You are not a fit if you’re a brilliant individual contributor who’s never led people, need the founder to set or enforce your standards for you, let quality slide under deadline pressure, work on polishing architecture and design while shipping stalls,  or can’t hold a hard line with developers you like.

We run a scored hiring process. Every candidate goes through the same gates: resume review; 60-second Loom video; culture interview; technical interview with a live code-review and architecture scenario; leadership scenario (lifting a team's engineering standard); team-operations scenario (running a sprint and standup, unblocking a stalled ticket); a technical 30 / 60 / 90 plan; and a paid trial if we need more proof before making an offer. We score technical depth, code-review and standards judgment, leadership and people growth, Jira and sprint facilitation, delivery discipline, AI tooling fluency, communication, and ownership.

Send your resume to [email protected] with a short note answering this: Tell us about a time you joined or inherited a Dev team whose engineering standards were lower than they should have been. What did you change, how did you get the team to actually adopt it, and what did you deliberately choose not to fight about – and why? If your application is a fit, we’ll send the 60-second Loom prompt as the next step.

This role owns engineering quality end-to-end. You'll have real authority from day one – the standard, the architecture, the process, the deploy call – and a small, capable team to build around you. Our clients run their livelihoods on what we ship, so the bar is high and the impact is direct: releases that hold, payroll that's right, a team that gets better because you lead it. If that's the standard you set, this is your seat.