Team Lead Kotlin Infrastructure

Are you an engineering leader who views developer infrastructure not as a collection of scripts, but as a core product that enables engineering craft at scale? Do you want to help shape long-term platform strategy and remove friction for hundreds of developers? Then you may be the person we're looking for to lead the Kotlin Infrastructure team at JetBrains. About JetBrains We create intelligent software development tools for developers and teams. More than 15 million users, over 300,000 companies, and 88 of the Fortune Global Top 100 rely on our products to solve real, complex problems. Our mission is simple: make development teams more productive and AI adoptable at scale. What you’ll do The Kotlin Infrastructure team enables development across the Kotlin repository by building and evolving the engineering infrastructure behind Kotlin development. The team is responsible for developer experience, build infrastructure, CI/CD, release infrastructure, internal tooling, and engineering processes that help Kotlin teams create, test, and deliver software efficiently. We're looking for a Team Lead who will help the team scale its impact across the Kotlin organization and the broader JetBrains engineering ecosystem. You'll work alongside an experienced Technical Lead and a team of highly skilled engineers. While the Technical Lead drives architecture and technical implementation, you'll shape infrastructure strategy, drive execution across multiple initiatives, and help Kotlin infrastructure evolve as an engineering platform. Day to day, you will: Engineering leadership • Define and drive the long-term evolution of Kotlin infrastructure together with the Technical Lead. • Own planning and prioritization across infrastructure initiatives, balancing immediate needs with long-term investments. • Drive initiatives that improve development productivity and the developer experience across the Kotlin engineering ecosystem. • Support engineers through coaching, feedback, and hiring. • Participate in cross-team collaboration to evolve the Kotlin infrastructure and engineering platforms. Infrastructure platform • Guide the evolution of infrastructure supporting Kotlin development, including: • Developer experience across local development, code review, CI, and merge workflows. • Kotlin build architecture and build performance. • CI/CD systems, release infrastructure, artifact publication, and engineering workflows. • Internal tooling, engineering automation, and development infrastructure management. • Secure engineering infrastructure, including dependency management, reproducible builds, secrets, access management, build agents, and development environments. What you’ll bring • An engineering mindset that values systemic efficiency and developer empathy over rigid processes. • The autonomy to make decisions close to the problem and accountability for the team’s choices. • Strong communication skills, with the ability to navigate architectural debates and align diverse engineering stakeholders. • A commitment to quality and refusal to cut corners on platform stability for short-term fixes. • The resilience to guide teams through open-ended, complex scaling challenges. What you’ll need • Experience leading engineering teams or large technical initiatives. • Strong communication skills and the ability to align multiple stakeholders. • Experience with developer infrastructure, build systems, CI/CD, or internal engineering platforms. • Understanding of software build systems and engineering workflows at scale. • Ability to evaluate technical proposals, facilitate architectural discussions, and help teams converge on pragmatic decisions. • A passion for improving developer productivity through tooling, automation, and p