Lead Software Engineer-Manager

About the role:
Our backend systems process millions of transactions, serve enterprise customers across industries, and must perform flawlessly under pressure. We are scaling fast and the decisions made at the architecture level today will define how the platform operates for years. We are hiring a Lead Backend Engineer to own that responsibility.

This is aTechnical Leadership role with real weight. You will set the architectural direction for core backend services, resolve ambiguity in complex distributed systems, engage directly with Product and DevOps peers, not a downstream implementer and be the person the team turns to when things go wrong in production. Your decisions will have a measurable impact on system reliability, engineering velocity, and the careers of the engineers you mentor.

We are looking for an engineer who has operated at this level before someone who understands that senior engineering skill and technical leadership are not the same thing, and who is ready to  take on both with full ownership.

Expectations:

• People Management & Leadership
• Technical Development & Guidance
• Handle a team of at least 5 direct reportees
• Conduct and manage performance appraisal cycles (minimum 2 cycles experience required)
• Allocate tasks among team members based on priorities and skill sets
• Track development progress and ensure timely delivery
• Monitor team productivity and maintain delivery records
• Mentor and guide developers technically and professionally
• Coordinate with stakeholders, managers, and cross-functional teams
• Resolve team issues, blockers, and escalations

What you will be expected to do

• Develop, enhance, and maintain backend services for existing User, Inventory, Pricing, Order and Payment Management systems running at scale.
• Write clean, efficient, and highly reliable code using Java 8 and above and Spring Boot 2.7 and above.
• Own and improve production systems with a strong focus on performance, scalability, availability, and fault tolerance.
• Debug and resolve complex production issues involving services, databases, caches, and messaging systems.
• Contribute to low-level design (LLD) and actively participate in high-level architecture (HLD) discussions for new features and system improvements.
• Work with event-driven and asynchronous architectures, ensuring correctness and reliability of data flows.
• Optimize database schemas, queries, indexing strategies, and caching layers for high-throughput workloads.
• Collaborate with DevOps, QA, and Product teams to support smooth 247 production operations.
• Own production health: monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and observability
• Lead incident response and root cause analysis (RCA) for critical system failures
• Drive proactive improvements to reduce incident frequency and blast radius
• Ensure systems meet SLAs under high-volume, production-grade conditions
• Participate in code reviews, design reviews, and incident post-mortems to continuously improve system quality.
• Take end-to-end ownership of backend components, from design and implementation to deployment and production support.
• Conduct technical design reviews and establish engineering best practices
• Mentor backend engineers at all levels; invest in their growth as a deliberate priority
• Partner with Product, QA, and DevOps to align on delivery, quality, and operational readiness
• Raise the engineering bar through code reviews, documentation standards, and knowledge sharing

You might be a strong candidate if you have/are

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
• 7+ years of experience building and maintaining backend systems in production environments.
• Strong proficiency in Java with hands-on experience in Spring Boot–based microservices.
• Solid understanding of data structures, algorithms, and backend problem solving.
• Strong experience with PostgreSQL or other relational databases in high-scale systems.
• Experience building and consuming RESTful APIs and working with asynchronous systems.
• Strong debugging and troubleshooting skills in live production systems.
• Good understanding of software engineering best practices, including testing, code reviews, CI/CD, and release management.
• Clear communication skills and ability to collaborate effectively within a team.
• Hands-on experience with Kafka or similar messaging/event-streaming platforms.
• Exposure to distributed systems, microservices architecture, and scaling strategies.
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes in production environments
• Cloud platform experience (AWS, Azure, or GCP)
• Caching with Redis: cache-aside, TTL strategies, cache invalidation patterns
• Resilience engineering: Circuit Breaker, Bulkhead, Retry, Rate Limiting patterns
• Experience using Redis, Elasticsearch, and MongoDB in production systems.
• Exposure to SRE or platform engineering practices
• Experience contributing to or leading engineering hiring processes