Lead Software Engineer (Backend)

Job Description

We’re building scalable, data-driven product systems and looking for a Lead Software Developer with strong engineering skills and a track record of designing and delivering complex, production-grade systems. You’ll lead the design and delivery of critical product components, collaborate closely with technical leads and senior stakeholders, and play a key role in driving technical quality, scalability, and engineering standards across a core product area.

Overview

• Own critical components end-to-end and deliver measurable improvements in system quality, scalability, and reliability. You operate independently, drive design decisions, and elevate engineering standards through technical leadership and mentorship.

What you’ll do

• Own delivery for significant features or systems: clarify requirements, design solutions, execute, ship, and iterate.
• Design and build scalable backend services, APIs, and data pipelines that support core product functionality.
• Drive system design decisions, balancing scalability, performance, reliability, and cost.
• Define how quality is measured for your area (success metrics, testing strategy, observability) and automate it wherever possible.
• Lead structured experimentation: define hypotheses, evaluate results, and translate insights into product and system improvements.
• Improve operational readiness: deployment automation, monitoring/alerting, incident response, and performance optimization.
• Mentor engineers through design reviews, code reviews, and hands-on technical guidance.
• Influence engineering best practices, architecture decisions, and long-term technical direction.

Engineering Expectations

• Strong system design skills with the ability to break down ambiguous problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Ability to evaluate new technologies, tools, and approaches, and recommend solutions based on trade-offs, impact, and ROI.
• Builds systems that are secure, reliable, and compliant by design, partnering with cross-functional teams when needed.
• Drives technical alignment across teams and contributes to improving engineering standards and processes.

How we work

• We balance exploration with delivery — test ideas quickly, then productionize what works.
• “Done” means quality goals are met, followed by continuous improvement in scalability, performance, and reliability.
• The team owns systems end-to-end (build, release, reliability).

Years of experience

• Overall: 6+ years in software engineering
• Relevant: 3+ years building and shipping production systems in product teams
• Technical (hands-on coding): 5+ years

Required skills & knowledge

• Strong software engineering fundamentals and advanced system design experience
• Hands-on coding in Python and/or TypeScript (or similar), building APIs, services, and data pipelines
• Experience designing and scaling distributed systems in production environments
• Strong experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure), CI/CD, automated testing, and observability
• Proven ability to own systems end-to-end, from design through production and iteration
• Experience working in fast-paced, ambiguous environments with evolving requirements
• Strong experimentation mindset: define metrics, build evaluation approaches, and iterate quickly

Desired (nice to have)

• Experience building data-driven or ML-enabled systems
• Familiarity with experimentation frameworks, A/B testing, or performance optimization
• Experience with event-driven architectures, streaming systems, or large-scale data processing
• Exposure to modern AI tools or integrations (not required)
• Contributions to open source, technical blogs, or conference talks

Education

• Bachelor’s in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent practical experience)