Senior Backend Team Lead

Job Summary

Lead a backend engineering team responsible for designing and maintaining scalable, high-performance systems. You will set technical direction, mentor engineers, and balance hands-on coding with architectural oversight and team development.

Responsibilities

• Lead backend team in designing and maintaining scalable, high-performance systems
• Set technical direction and review architecture decisions
• Ensure predictable and clean delivery through planning, work breakdown, and realistic estimation
• Mentor engineers and conduct code reviews that provide constructive feedback and build team capability
• Collaborate with frontend, product, and DevOps teams to translate requirements into reliable backend solutions
• Identify and remove blockers to prevent delivery delays
• Participate in hands-on design, coding, and debugging while maintaining system-wide perspective
• Lead technical discussions and make informed trade-off decisions

Must haves

• Proven experience leading a small to mid-sized backend engineering team, including ownership of delivery and technical direction
• Hands-on experience with microservices or well-structured modular architectures in production environments
• Strong background in performance optimization, monitoring, and system observability (metrics, logs, alerts)
• Demonstrated experience mentoring junior and mid-level engineers, including code reviews, technical guidance, and growth support
• 8+ years of professional experience in backend or software development, with experience operating production systems
• Proficiency in at least one of: Node.js, Python, or Go, with production-level experience

Nice to haves

• Experience with cloud environments and CI/CD pipelines
• Experience with distributed systems
• Background working in fast-moving product or platform teams

Requirements

• Strong foundations in Computer Science concepts, including data structures, algorithms, and system design
• Solid experience in backend web development and object-oriented design, with focus on maintainable architectures
• Hands-on experience with databases (relational and/or NoSQL), including schema design and query optimization
• Strong experience using Git and collaborative version control workflows
• Comfortable working in Linux-based environments; scripting and automation experience is a plus
• Proven problem-solving and analytical skills, especially when debugging complex backend or system issues
• Experience working within Agile/Scrum teams and contributing to planning, estimation, and delivery
• Ability to work effectively both independently and as a technical leader within a team
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience
• Comfortable designing APIs and backend services at scale, working with relational and/or NoSQL databases, and writing clean, testable, production-ready code

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