---
title: 'Software Development Team Lead, Infrastructure Platform Team at Spare'
canonical: 'https://feeny.ai/job/software-development-team-lead-infrastructure-platform-team-spare-vancouver-metxmpjbhv2z'
type: 'job'
last_seen: '2026-10-15'
---

# Software Development Team Lead, Infrastructure Platform Team at Spare

- **Company:** Spare
- **Location:** Vancouver, Canada
- **Compensation:** $150k–$260k
- **Employment:** full-time
- **Work type:** hybrid
- **Posted:** 2026-09-18
- **Last confirmed live:** 2026-10-15
- **Apply:** https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/spare/fa815eef-e2f8-4631-91c4-6231e5273b90

## Job description

## About Us

Spare is a fast-growing, successful startup. We thrive on innovation, rapid execution, and delivering top-tier products that make a real impact in the transit industry. We are now seeking a Software Development Team Lead to join our Infrastructure Platform Team and help build and operate the cloud platform that every Spare product runs on.

## About This Role

As leader of the team responsible for Spare's core infrastructure platform, you will play a critical role in designing and building the reliable, secure, and cost-efficient foundation that powers our customers' on-demand transit systems. Working closely with others on the team, you will own the correct and efficient operation of the platform across a variety of real-world production scenarios. In this role, you'll split your time 50/50 between hands-on technical contribution and people leadership, working in an autonomous environment where you'll solve interesting technical challenges while growing and mentoring a high-performing team. Currently there are four software developers reporting to this role. Given the nature of our business, this role requires someone who can balance technical expertise with strong product sensibilities, creating solutions that are both technically sound and accessible to end users. The role includes some travel as part of the job responsibilities – specifically, up to four customer site visits per year to gain firsthand insights, plus participation in our biannual software development hackathons in Vancouver.

## Key Responsibilities

- Own the design and development of core infrastructure platform capabilities from inception to launch
- Build and evolve tooling, automation, and platform services that make every engineering team at Spare faster and safer
- Architect and implement high-performance, scalable distributed systems on GCP and Kubernetes
- Drive improvements in cluster reliability, application resilience, and internal access security
- Operate and maintain Spare's Redis and PostgreSQL databases — availability, performance tuning, scaling, upgrades, backups, and disaster recovery
- Drive Spare toward AI SRE practices — embed AI agents into incident detection, alert triage, and operational workflows to make reliability work faster and more proactive
- Manage and continuously improve the SRE on-call rotation — healthy schedules, clear escalation paths, and blameless post-mortems that turn incidents into systemic improvements
- Drive FinOps practices across the organization — own cloud spend visibility, right-sizing, and cost optimization initiatives that deliver measurable savings
- Use AI agentic tooling daily to accelerate your own and your team's engineering output, and coach the team to do the same
- Actively mentor software developers of all levels and uplift team capacity
- Collaborate cross-functionally with product managers, designers, and other software developers
- Ensure 99.99% uptime and maintain exceptional system performance
- Participate in team agile rituals and help improve software development processes

## Who You Are

- A highly productive software developer with a proven track record of delivering high-quality code in complex environments
- Highly proficient with modern AI development tools and agentic workflows — you use AI to move faster and think better, not as a crutch
- A passionate mentor and technical leader who enjoys helping others grow
- Passionate about distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and platform engineering
- Cost-conscious by default — you treat cloud spend as an engineering problem and know how to deliver savings without sacrificing reliability
- Adept at balancing reliability and security rigor with practical developer-experience constraints

## Requirements

- 7+ years of software development experience, with at least 2+ years in a people leadership role
- Expert in backend technologies with strong distributed systems experience
- Demonstrated proficiency with AI-assisted and agentic development workflows (AI coding agents, automation of engineering and operational tasks)
- Experience operating systems at scale with a strong reliability and uptime mindset
- Experience running or managing an SRE on-call rotation, including incident response and post-mortem culture
- Deep experience with cloud infrastructure (GCP) and container orchestration (Kubernetes)
- Experience driving cloud cost optimization and FinOps initiatives — right-sizing, spend visibility, and measurable cost savings
- Experience with infrastructure-as-code and configuration management tooling (Terraform)
- Understanding of security best practices, especially around internal access control and container security
- Demonstrated success in managing a team of software developers, with a focus on team and individual performance
- Demonstrated ability to mentor other developers and provide technical leadership
- Strong problem-solving, debugging, and system design skills
- Excellent communication and collaboration skills

It will be considered a plus (nice-to-have):

- Experience in the transit industry or another real-time, safety-critical domain
- Experience building internal developer platforms and golden-path tooling
- Experience applying AI/LLM tooling to SRE or infrastructure operations (AIOps, automated incident triage)
- Experience with CI/CD systems at scale, including test sharding and build performance
- Experience operating and maintaining PostgreSQL and Redis in production — performance tuning, indexing, replication, backup and restore

Don't meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of colour are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification in the job posting. At Spare, we are committed to creating a diverse and inclusive environment so we strongly encourage you to apply even if you don't believe you meet every single qualification outlined. We also do our best to respond to all applications we receive.

## About the Infrastructure Platform Team

The Infrastructure Platform Team's job is to build and run the foundation that Spare's on-demand transportation platform depends on — where circumstances change in real time and downtime is not an option. Primarily this involves keeping our Kubernetes clusters reliable and secure, hardening our application resilience, driving cloud cost efficiency, and making sure our distributed systems can handle real-time updates efficiently.

Why Join Us?

- Work on challenging technical problems with real-world impact in the transportation industry
- A fast-paced, high-impact role in a rapidly growing startup
- The opportunity to take ownership of core systems and drive innovation
- A dynamic, collaborative, and supportive team culture
- Competitive salary and equity options

If you are ready to tackle complex routing and optimization challenges and thrive in a high-performance environment, we'd love to hear from you!

## About Spare

## Company Overview
- **One-liner**: Spare provides an AI-native operations platform for transit agencies to modernize paratransit, microtransit, fixed-route, and asset management services.
- **Entity Type**: Private (funded startup)
- **Headquarters**: Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
- **Founded**: 2015
- **Founders**: Kristoffer Vik Hansen, Josh Andrews, Alexey Indeev

## Core Business
- Primary industry: Transit technology / mobility operations software (SaaS)
- Target customers: Government transit agencies and municipalities (B2G), including ADA paratransit operators and on-demand mobility services
- Mission: To make owning a car optional and to unlock sustainable, convenient, and affordable transportation for everyone; empowering agencies to do more with limited budgets while improving rider experience

## Products & Services
- **AI Voice**: Handles routine bookings and rider inquiries in multiple languages, reducing call center volume by 60%.
- **Analytics & Reporting**: Real-time dashboards and natural-language querying (“Scout”) to turn operational data into actionable insights.
- **Asset Management (EAM)**: Integrated management of vehicles, facilities, and equipment with automated inspections and maintenance work orders.
- **Service Planner (New)**: Plan, publish, schedule, and operate fixed-route services within the same platform.
- **Dispatcher**: Real-time dispatch with AI-assisted routing to improve on-time performance and reduce cost per trip.
- **Scheduler**: Adaptive scheduling that responds in real time to exceptions and demand changes.
- **Case Intelligence**: Connects on-road patterns across systems for faster issue resolution.
- **Technician Copilot**: AI-assisted diagnostics and maintenance guidance to keep fleets road-ready.
- **Guidance**: Operational decision support with explainable, auditable AI actions.
- **Fixed Route**: Monitoring, planning, and performance tools for traditional fixed-route networks.
- **Microtransit**: On-demand, flexible services that extend fixed-route coverage.
- **Paratransit**: End-to-end support for ADA paratransit eligibility, booking, dispatch, and payments.

## Market Standing
- **Valuation/Market Cap**: Not publicly disclosed
- **Key Metric**: Annual revenue of ~$45M (LinkedIn) and total funding of $125.2M across 7 rounds (LinkedIn, 2025)
- **Notable Clients**: LA Metro, DART, PSTA, MBTA, AC Transit/BART, CapMetro, Milton Transit, Translink, Winnipeg Transit (serving 200+ transit agencies in 14 countries)
- **Growth Signals**: 37M+ trips powered, 230+ communities served, 165 employees (+27.3% YoY), 20x adoption growth for AI Voice in 18 months, 97% rider satisfaction, 30% average cost reduction per trip across paratransit deployments

## Competitive Advantages
- **AI-native, unified platform**: Single system covering paratransit, microtransit, fixed route, and asset management – breaking silos that plague legacy software.
- **Purpose-built for transit**: Built specifically for ADA, NEMT, and compliance complexity; every AI action is auditable and explainable.
- **Real-time adaptability**: Schedules and dispatches adjust in real time using AI, not just overnight batch processing.
- **Proven scale**: 35M+ boardings and counting, with deep operational expertise embedded by a team of transit veterans.

## Strategic Focus
- Expanding AI capabilities across all product lines (voice, dispatch, maintenance, analytics)
- Integrating fixed-route planning and asset management to offer a truly comprehensive “one platform” for all transit modes
- Continued international expansion (already in US, Canada, Colombia, France, Brazil, Philippines)
- Helping agencies do more with constrained budgets while maintaining service quality

## Why Work Here
- **Mission-driven culture**: Opportunity to shape the future of public transit and make mobility equitable for all.
- **Flexible workplace**: Commuting optional – office allowance and monthly coworking stipend provided.
- **Competitive compensation**: Country-based salary structure, stock options, performance bonuses, and regular promotion cycles (twice a year).
- **Benefits**: Company-paid health/dental/EFAP, 15-week paid parental leave, open sick leave, lifestyle spending account.
- **Growth & transparency**: 360 feedback, direct access to leadership, skills development support.
- **Engineering culture**: Small, brilliant team focused on solving real-world transportation challenges with AI.

## Sources
1. [spare.com](https://spare.com/)
2. [spare.com/company/about-us](https://spare.com/company/about-us)
3. [spare.com/company/working-at-spare](https://spare.com/company/working-at-spare)
4. [linkedin.com/company/spare](https://ca.linkedin.com/company/spare)
5. [apply.workable.com/spare](https://apply.workable.com/spare/?lng=en)

## Other roles at Spare

- [Junior AI-Accelerated Developer](https://feeny.ai/job/junior-ai-accelerated-developer-spare-vancouver-ba6y4cjstrtp) — Vancouver, Canada
- [Senior Front End Developer](https://feeny.ai/job/senior-front-end-developer-spare-vancouver-bjrzw7qm9qxg) — Vancouver, Canada