Are you looking to join a dynamic team that provides its people with the tools to be successfull and opportunities to grow?
Universal Logistics is a leading provider of customized transportation and logistics solutions, offering a comprehensive suite of services including transportation, value-added, intermodal, and specialized services utilized throughout entire supply chains. 
Universal has immediate career opportunities in your area. Apply today to become part of the Universal team! 

This document defines the internal responsibilities and expectations for Team Lead Software Developers. The goal is to align all leads on their role as technical leaders, delivery owners, team coordinators, and cross-functional collaborators within a multi-system, multi-stakeholder environment.

1. Technical Leadership

• Serve as the senior technical authority for your team, guiding architectural decisions and enforcing coding standards.
• Conduct code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability, security, and alignment with system design principles.
• Actively contribute code when needed—especially on complex, sensitive, or time-constrained workstreams.
• Drive continuous improvement in coding practices, design patterns, and team technical standards.
• Champion cloud-native practices (Kubernetes, serverless, multi-cloud) and foster a culture of observability and systematic debugging.
• Maintain literacy in emerging technologies (e.g., AI/ML, automation) and evaluate their ethical, secure application within the organization.

2. Business Requirement Facilitation

• Engage directly with requestors and operations stakeholders to extract, clarify, and refine raw requirements.
• Ensure all work is clearly defined and scoped before being assigned to less experienced developers.
• Validate technical feasibility early and document any assumptions or constraints.
• Ensure user and system requirements are aligned with business outcomes and technical reality.
• Balance business and technical trade-offs with economic thinking (cost vs. value decisions).
• Ensure alignment with customer value and end-user experience.

3. Deadline and Milestone Ownership

• Define and manage project timelines, including intermediate milestones and delivery checkpoints.
• Track progress, anticipate blockers, and proactively adjust timelines or reassign work to maintain momentum.
• Communicate any shifts in scope, timing, or risk to relevant stakeholders immediately.
• Handle ambiguity effectively, clarifying unclear requirements and risks early.

6. Team Coordination, Delegation, and Accountability

• Run regular stand-up meetings to review progress, surface blockers, and align on priorities.
• Ensure work is appropriately assigned through available tickets or tasks.
• Match tasks to developer strengths and availability while encouraging growth.
• Track individual progress and hold developers accountable for timely and quality delivery.
• Provide constructive feedback and clarify expectations where needed.
• Apply structured performance management practices, including constructive feedback, conflict resolution, and succession planning.
• Support developer experience (DevEx) improvements by reducing workflow friction and advocating for better tools.

7. Cross-Team Collaboration

• Coordinate resource sharing and task dependencies with other technical leads.
• Ensure requests for shared developer time respect other teams’ priorities and timelines.
• Act as a good partner across functions, contributing to a culture of mutual support and shared success.
• Work closely with product, design, QA, security, and data science teams to deliver holistic outcomes.

9. Planning and Prioritization

• Contribute to sprint planning, backlog refinement/grooming, and cross-team scheduling discussions.
• Ensure that new work is evaluated, estimated, and prioritized appropriately.
• Balance planned project work with support requests and unplanned needs.
• Make trade-offs between tech debt, innovation, and short-term delivery as needed.
• Use engineering metrics (e.g., DORA) and customer data insights to inform prioritization.

10. Mentorship and Team Development

• Mentor junior and mid-level developers through design guidance, code reviews, and task support.
• Encourage best practices, documentation, and continuous improvement.
• Promote a collaborative team environment that values growth, accountability, and technical excellence.
• Support developer performance reviews, career development conversations, and technical goal-setting.
• Provide formal growth paths, learning opportunities, and upskilling support (training, certifications, conferences).
• Recognize contributions through structured recognition and engagement mechanisms.

13. DevOps & Operational Readiness

• Partner with DevOps/platform teams to ensure robust CI/CD pipelines and monitoring.
• Own production readiness, including deployment plans, observability, logging, and alerting.
• Participate in incident response and root cause analysis for production issues.
• Improve system uptime, deployment reliability, and developer feedback loops.
• Adopt SRE principles (SLAs, SLOs, error budgets) to balance reliability with delivery.

14. Security & Compliance Awareness

• Apply secure coding practices and champion security-first design.
• Ensure all systems meet compliance requirements (e.g., GDPR, SOC 2) as applicable.
• Collaborate with security teams to remediate risks or vulnerabilities proactively.
• Integrate accessibility, sustainability, and ethical technology practices into engineering standards.

16. Innovation and Technical Strategy

• Evaluate emerging tools, patterns, and frameworks for potential adoption.
• Influence long-term system architecture and platform strategy in collaboration with other leads.
• Allocate time and space for innovation, tech spikes, or refactoring efforts.
• Ensure innovation aligns with broader organizational strategy and customer outcomes.

17. Team Health & Culture

• Model professionalism, inclusivity, adaptability, and ownership in all interactions.
• Promote psychological safety, respectful communication, and team trust.
• Monitor for signs of burnout, overwork, or conflict—and address proactively.
• Ensure team wins are recognized and learning from failures is normalized.

Key Expectations

• Lead delivery through a combination of hands-on development and structured coordination.
• Own your team’s scope, progress, and stakeholder communication.
• Maintain full visibility into workstreams; ensure clear task assignment and accountability.
• Communicate with clarity and purpose—upward, downward, and laterally.
• Champion a sustainable, high-performance culture through technical excellence, leadership, and empathy.
• Influence organizational culture, align engineering initiatives with business strategy, and foster sustainable innovation.

Work Model

This position is fully onsite in Warren, MI.

Full-time – Monday through Friday.

Other Benefits

We offer benefits including major medical, dental, vision, 401K, and paid time off!