Lead Backend Engineer

Roles & Responsibilities

In this role, you will be the driving force behind the backend team, ensuring technical excellence and a high-performance culture.

Technical Leadership

• Own the technical architecture of backend modules and services.
• Design scalable, reliable, secure, and maintainable backend systems.
• Lead technical design discussions and make architectural decisions aligned with long-term product strategy.
• Review and approve technical designs, APIs, and implementation approaches.
• Drive adoption of modern backend engineering practices and design patterns.

Backend Development:

• Design and develop high-performance backend services using Python, Django, and Golang.
• Build scalable microservices capable of handling large-scale enterprise workloads.
• Design REST and gRPC APIs following industry best practices.
• Optimize backend services for scalability, latency, throughput, and resource utilization.
• Ensure software is modular, reusable, maintainable, and well documented.

Engineering Excellence

• Establish and enforce coding standards and engineering best practices.
• Lead rigorous code reviews to ensure quality, maintainability, and security.
• Promote clean architecture, test-driven development, automated testing, and CI/CD practices.
• Drive reduction of technical debt and continuously improve code quality.
• Encourage the effective use of AI-assisted development tools to improve engineering productivity while maintaining high engineering standards.

Production Ownership

• Own the production quality of backend services.
• Drive performance tuning, reliability improvements, and production readiness.
• Participate in root cause analysis for production issues and implement long-term preventive measures.
• Ensure backend services are observable through comprehensive logging, monitoring, metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Continuously improve platform stability, availability, and operational excellence

Team Leadership & Mentorship

• Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through technical coaching, design reviews, pair programming, and regular feedback.
• Support onboarding of new engineers and accelerate their technical growth.
• Foster a collaborative engineering culture focused on learning, ownership, and innovation.
• Help identify future technical leaders within the team.

Engineering Governance

• Review Product Requirement Documents (PRDs), Design Documents (DRDs), API specifications, and implementation plans.
• Ensure engineering solutions align with architectural standards and long-term product vision.
• Drive engineering consistency across backend teams.
• Promote engineering best practices in estimation, documentation, testing, and release readiness.

Cross-functional Collaboration

• Partner with Product Managers to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Collaborate with Architects, Platform Engineering, Frontend teams, QA, DevOps, and Customer Success teams throughout the product lifecycle.
• Participate in sprint planning, estimation, backlog refinement, and release planning.
• Drive technical alignment across multiple engineering teams.

What You Bring

Technical Experience:

• 8+ years of backend software development experience with strong expertise in Python, Django and Golang.
• Experience building scalable backend platforms using Golang is highly preferred.
• Proven experience designing and delivering large-scale distributed systems.
• Strong understanding of microservices architecture and event-driven systems.
• Excellent knowledge of multithreading, concurrency, caching, and performance optimization techniques.
• Strong experience with SQL and NoSQL databases.
• Experience working with high-volume data platforms such as ClickHouse, Elasticsearch, Kafka, or similar technologies.
• Strong understanding of REST APIs, gRPC, API versioning, and service integration patterns.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Good understanding of cloud-native application development.
• Strong knowledge of observability concepts including logging, metrics, tracing, and monitoring.
• Excellent understanding of data structures, algorithms, object-oriented design, and software design patterns.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated testing frameworks.
• Good understanding of secure coding practices and application security principles.
• Exposure to AI-assisted software development workflows and developer productivity tools.

Leadership Skills

• Proven experience leading backend engineering teams.
• Strong mentoring and coaching abilities.
• Ability to drive technical discussions and build consensus across teams.
• Strong ownership mindset with accountability for engineering outcomes.
• Excellent problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Ability to balance technical excellence with business priorities.
• Experience managing competing priorities in a fast-paced product engineering environment.

Professional Attributes

• Excellent verbal and written communication skills.
• Strong collaboration and stakeholder management skills.
• High attention to detail and commitment to engineering excellence.
• Passion for building scalable, high-quality enterprise software.
• Self-driven, proactive, and comfortable taking ownership.
• Continuous learner with curiosity for emerging technologies and engineering practices.
• Thrives in a collaborative, fast-paced startup environment.

Nice to Have

• Experience building observability, monitoring, or analytics platforms.
• Experience working with large-scale enterprise SaaS products.
• Familiarity with distributed messaging platforms and stream processing.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• Experience with performance benchmarking and capacity planning.