Technical Lead – Backend Systems

Role Summary

We are hiring a Technical Lead – Backend Systems with 10+ years of backend/software engineering experience who will own backend architecture and system design while remaining deeply hands-on.

This role is for an experienced engineer who is already making architectural decisions and can design, build, and evolve distributed backend systems. You will define architectural standards and guide teams through complex technical decisions.

Required Qualifications

Must Have

1. 10+ years of backend/software engineering experience
2. 3+ years of production experience with FastAPI
3. Expert-level knowledge of Python
4. Strong experience with:
5. Relational databases such as PostgreSQL or MySQL
6. At least one NoSQL datastore
7. Deep understanding of:
8. Backend architecture patterns
9. Design patterns, including GoF, SOLID, and DDD concepts
10. Distributed systems fundamentals
11. 
    

Additional Qualifications

1. Experience designing and evolving large-scale systems
2. Practical experience with cloud services and deployments
3. Proven ability to lead technical decisions and architecture discussions
4. Experience migrating monoliths to microservices, or making informed decisions not to
5. Experience with event-driven or streaming systems
6. Experience with API gateways, rate limiting, and authentication systems such as OAuth2 and JWT
7. Prior experience as a Senior Backend Developer, Tech Lead, or Solution Architect

Core Responsibilities

1. System Design & Architecture

1. Design end-to-end backend systems with a focus on scalability, resilience, and maintainability
2. Define service boundaries, data ownership, and communication patterns
3. Select and apply appropriate architecture patterns, including:
4. Modular monoliths
5. Microservices
6. Event-driven systems
7. Layered and hexagonal architectures
8. Drive architectural trade-off decisions across performance, cost, and complexity
9. Create architecture diagrams, Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), Data Flow Diagrams, and technical design documents

2. Backend Engineering

1. Design and develop high-performance backend services using Python and FastAPI
2. Build and maintain RESTful APIs and asynchronous services
3. Handle concurrency, background processing, and I/O-intensive workloads
4. Enforce clean code, SOLID principles, and testability
5. Lead code reviews with a focus on correctness, performance, and long-term maintainability

3. Data Engineering

1. Design and optimize schemas in RDBMS such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, including:
2. Indexing
3. Query optimization
4. Transactions
5. Isolation levels
6. Design data models for NoSQL systems such as MongoDB, DynamoDB, and Redis
7. Select the appropriate data store based on access patterns and consistency requirements
8. Handle database migrations, versioning, and backward compatibility

4. Distributed Systems

1. Design systems capable of handling:
2. Partial failures
3. Retries, timeouts, and idempotency
4. Horizontal scaling
5. Work with message brokers and asynchronous communication systems such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, and SQS
6. Understand consistency models, eventual consistency, and data replication

5. DevOps & Cloud

1. Work with cloud environments such as AWS, Azure, or GCP
2. Containerize services using Docker
3. Deploy services using CI/CD pipelines
4. Understand Kubernetes concepts such as pods, services, and autoscaling, or equivalent managed alternatives
5. Collaborate with DevOps/SRE teams on observability, logging, and monitoring

6. Technical Leadership

1. Act as the technical owner for backend systems
2. Mentor senior and mid-level engineers
3. Establish engineering standards and best practices
4. Work closely with product and business stakeholders to translate requirements into robust technical designs