Job description for Tech Lead at Waffle
Full-time, on-site in Bandung.Waffle's founders lead the business and accounting side; neither is an engineer. This role exists because the technical side needs a genuine owner — a long-term ownership role, not a contract to execute a specification.The Technical Lead owns the technical direction: architecture, code quality, and what gets built and how. Day to day that means designing solutions, reviewing code, working through production problems, and translating how a business actually operates into something that works on screen. As the team grows, the Technical Lead hires and leads it.The role also involves working directly with the businesses using Waffle. That isn't a perk — it's how the product gets decided.
How the split works. The Technical Lead owns engineering. The founders own the business, the customers and the domain. Where they meet it gets argued out: engineering decides how, the business decides what, and neither side pulls rank on the other's.
What you'd inherit. Not a greenfield, and not a mess. A working production system — multi-tenant, double-entry accounting core, inventory with weighted-average costing, manufacturing, POS with offline support, payroll — with build-wired guards, regression suites, and a written record of the architectural decisions and why they were made. Part of the job is judging that inheritance rather than accepting it, and saying what's wrong with it.
Qualifications
Strong across backend and frontend, with real system design judgement. The stack is TypeScript throughout — Next.js, React, Prisma, PostgreSQL — but how you think matters more than what you've used
You've shipped things and then lived with them: maintained, fixed, watched them break in production
You want to lead. If this would be your first time owning a system end to end, that's fine — wanting it matters more than having done it before
Comfortable with correctness as a hard constraint. In an ERP the numbers reconcile or the product is worthless
Able to talk to a non-technical person about their problem without making them feel stupid
Helpful but not required: ERP, accounting, inventory or POS systems; multi-tenant SaaS; real PostgreSQL depth
