Join The Team
We love food, technology and data, and we’re changing the food & beverage industry for the better.
R&D Team Lead
About The Position
Passionate about food and curious about what drives consumer choices? Join Tastewise and help shape the future of the food and beverage industry.
Tastewise is a human-and-agent food intelligence and marketing platform used by leading companies like PepsiCo, Nestlé, and Kraft Heinz to decide what products to launch, how to market them, and what ultimately makes it to the shelf.
We turn real consumer behavior into actionable insights, helping teams make smarter, faster decisions in a $10 trillion industry that impacts billions of people every day.
If you’re excited about turning data into real-world impact and being part of a collaborative team with a clear mission, this is the place for you!
About the role
We’re looking for an R&D Team Lead to join our team and report directly to our VP R&D. This role sits at the intersection of engineering, product, and business—transforming real strategic challenges from global food & beverage leaders into scalable platform capabilities.
This is a hands-on leadership role with a strong full-stack engineering focus. You’ll lead a high-impact team of 4-5 engineers, owning end-to-end delivery while staying close to both the code and the customer. As a growing startup, we’re looking for someone who is excited by breadth, ambiguity, and the opportunity to help shape how our R&D organization evolves over time.
At Tastewise, you’re not just building features. You’re redefining how an entire industry operates.
Key Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a team of full-stack engineers, fostering collaboration, growth, and technical excellence.
- Balance short-term customer deliverables with long-term platform development and scalability.
- Partner closely with Product to shape the roadmap using real-world customer insights and strategic needs.
- Drive technical decision-making that supports both immediate project goals and broader platform architecture.
- Define and champion best practices for rapid prototyping, customer collaboration, and building solutions that scale.
Requirements
- At least 3 years of experience leading engineering teams, with a strong track record of mentoring, motivating, and delivering results through others.
- Strong hands-on background in full-stack development, with deep experience building and maintaining production-grade systems.
- Proven expertise with React and Node.js, including designing user-facing applications and scalable, high-performance backend services.
- Solid understanding of system architecture, API design, and modern development best practices.
- Experience working closely with Product, stakeholders, and customers to translate business needs into technical solutions.
- Ability to balance hands-on technical contribution with people leadership in a fast-paced startup environment.
- A broad engineering mindset and curiosity for adjacent domains (e.g., data, infrastructure, or ML), with the flexibility to grow into wider technical ownership as the team and platform evolve.
Nice to Have:
- Experience with generative AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, or LangChain, as well as AI engineering companions like Cursor or Claude Code
- Strong system design and architecture skills with an eye for performance, scalability, and maintainability
- Familiarity with cloud platforms and modern DevOps practices
- Understanding of data engineering fundamentals and best practices
Please note that this role is on a hybrid model of 4 days/week in our Tel-Aviv office.