Backend Team Lead

Why TREAT?

TREAT is a gaming startup in hyper-growth, revolutionizing the industry with our Play to Impact

Real Lives model. Through gamification, TREAT enables pet lovers to take care of real animals

in need - like a real-life “Tamagotchi”. With over 50 million annual meals, treats, and toys earned to shelter animals, TREAT is making a significant difference.

Our vision: Entertain millions while impacting millions of lives.

Who are we looking for?

We are looking for an exceptional Backend Team Lead

to take technical ownership of the systems behind TREAT’s live product.

You will lead an experienced backend team, guide the architectural direction, and remain deeply involved in engineering- approximately 60% hands-on

.

This is not a coordination-only role. You will write and review code, make consequential technical decisions, solve production problems, and raise the engineering bar across the team.

The right person combines strong technical depth with product and business judgment. You understand when to invest in architecture, when to optimize for speed, and how backend decisions ultimately affect the player experience.

Responsibilities:

• Lead an experienced backend team and provide clear technical direction.
• Drive effective use of AI in backend development, while applying the technical judgment required to challenge, validate, and improve AI-generated output.
• Own the architecture and evolution of backend systems handling millions of daily production requests.
• Design, build, and review production services across our Java, Spring, and Kotlin environment.
• Take end-to-end responsibility for reliability, scalability, performance, observability, and infrastructure cost.
• Own the backend journey across customer-facing experiences, internal tools, and operational systems.
• Set high standards for system design, code quality, testing, deployment, and production readiness.
• Make pragmatic decisions that balance immediate product needs with long-term technical health.
• Work closely with product, client, data, and other engineering stakeholders.
• Help shape how the backend organization and technical scope evolve as TREAT grows.

Requirements:

• Proven experience as a Backend Team Lead, Technical Lead, or equivalent, leading experienced engineers in a production environment and fast development cycles.

• Proven ability to effectively leverage AI development tools as part of the software development process, while applying strong technical judgment to evaluate, challenge, validate, and improve AI-generated architecture and code.

• Strong, recent hands-on experience with Java and Spring

  , alongside practical experience with Kotlin

  .

• Deep understanding of cloud-native architecture, distributed systems, microservices, and production operations.

• Experience designing and operating systems at meaningful scale.

• Strong experience with relational and non-relational databases.

• Strong product and business judgment, with an understanding of how technical decisions affect customers and company outcomes.

• Experience working in fast-moving environments where priorities evolve and not every problem arrives fully defined.

• Clear communication, sound decision-making, and the confidence to challenge assumptions constructively.

Strong advantages:

• Experience building high-scale B2C products.

• Experience in gaming or another live consumer-product environment.

• Hands-on experience with GCP

  .

• A record of building or exploring technology beyond assigned day-to-day responsibilities.

Why this role matters:

You will join a live product with real users, real scale, and an experienced team. You will have the mandate to improve its technical foundations without losing delivery momentum- and the opportunity to see your engineering decisions influence both the player experience and the lives of real animals.

** Work setup:** Fully remote role, with core working hours Sunday-Thursday, 9:00 AM - 6:00 PM Israel time.