Tech Lead, Next-Generation Public Safety Platform (Hands-On)

Location: Israel, hybrid Reports to: R&D leadership Headline Own the architecture, the code and the first team of a greenfield, AI-native public-safety platform. About KabatOne KabatOne builds a unified, mission-critical public safety platform connecting emergency dispatch, GIS, video, sensors, incident management, mobile responders, evidence, and third-party systems. Our products support real-time decision-making in complex command-center environments across multiple countries. The Role We are building our next-generation platform: a greenfield, cloud-native and on-premises-deployable operational platform that will become the foundation of our product line. We are looking for a hands-on Tech Lead to own it from the ground up. You will own the architecture, write production code, make and document the technical decisions, and build and lead the engineering team that delivers it. The platform is developed with an AI-native, spec-driven engineering workflow in which AI coding agents do much of the mechanical work under human specification, review and approval. You will own that way of working for the team as well. This is a technical leadership role, not an AI research role and not a people-management-only role. Humans decide; the platform and the process are built so that operators and engineers stay in control. What You'll Do - Own the technical direction of the platform: architecture, technology stack, engineering standards and the decisions that outlive any single feature, documented as you go. - Take ownership of the existing foundation: review it, keep what holds, change what does not. - Write production code, especially the hard parts: multi-tenancy and security, the core event and data model, integrations, and the real-time operator path. Expect roughly half your time hands-on in the first year. - Define the MVP together with Product and deliver it as a working system that can be deployed to a first set of customers. - Build the team: hire and onboard the first engineers, set the practices, run the review and merge gates, grow people. - Lead the AI-native development process: adopt and evolve our spec-driven, gated workflow, integrate AI coding agents with clear guardrails and human accountability, and measure quality and cost. - Design the platform to be AI-ready: data model, event semantics, audit trail and integration seams that allow decision-support and AI-assisted capabilities to be added later without redesign. - Own delivery engineering with DevOps: environments, CI/CD, observability, release and upgrade path, and the security posture of the codebase and its tooling. - Work closely with Product and business stakeholders, DevOps, our existing product development teams, and the operational reality of command centers. Requirements - 8+ years building backend or platform software, with deep TypeScript / Node.js in production (NestJS or equivalent) and strong PostgreSQL. - Has taken a greenfield system from zero to production and operated it, and has taken over a codebase built by others and made it their own. - Real-time or event-driven systems in production: message streams, WebSockets, workflow engines. - Multi-tenant and deployable systems: tenancy isolation, deployment topologies, containers and Kubernetes fundamentals. - 2+ years leading a small engineering team as a coding lead, hiring included. - AI-native way of working: daily use of AI coding agents, spec-first development with review gates, critical judgement of AI output, and a clear sense of where guardrails belong. - Architecture judgement and scope discipline: can cut to an MVP, say no, and write decisions down. - Fluent English. Advantages - Public safety, CAD, PSIM, video management, GIS or smart-city domain experience. - Angular; Kubernetes and Helm; on-premises or air-gapped delivery; Kafka, Temporal, Keycloak / OIDC; OpenTelemetry. - Shipping LLM-based features inside a product (retrieval, agents, evaluations, guardrails). - Leading distributed teams. KabatOne operates development teams in Israel and Mexico. - Spanish. Your First Year - The architecture and stack are yours: reviewed, decided, documented. - A team is in place and shipping through the gated workflow. - The MVP is defined and delivered as a working system deployable to a first set of customers. - The AI-native development process is running with measured quality and cost. Show more Show less