The Lead Backend Engineer owns the growth and output of a backend engineering pod - hiring, developing, and managing a small team - while remaining a strong hands-on contributor and a voice in technical direction. This is a player-coach role: you'll write code and review architecture alongside your team, not just direct it from a distance, while also partnering with Talent to build out the team and with Engineering leadership to shape where the backend goes next.
You Will:- Build and lead a team - hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing group of backend engineers as we scale.
- Shape technical direction - influence architecture, tooling, and roadmap decisions across backend systems.
- Stay hands-on - architect optimal solutions to our business problems and ship features alongside your team.
- Scale our systems - help us grow to tens of millions of customers and connected devices.
- Raise the bar - build quality tools and frameworks to ensure a high-quality product.
- Protect reliability - build systems to ensure continuous uptime.
Responsibilities:- Influence technical direction and architectural decisions across backend systems - balancing pragmatism with long-term scalability.
- Champion a bias toward action - prototype to resolve disagreements, ship incrementally, and avoid analysis paralysis on reversible decisions.
- Model high autonomy for your team - make sound judgment calls without unnecessary approval layers, while remaining accountable for outcomes.
- Continuously improve systems beyond your immediate scope - identify and fix inefficiencies, technical debt, or brittle abstractions wherever you find them, regardless of team ownership.
- Develop and maintain RESTful APIs using Java (Spring Boot or related web frameworks) or Python (Flask, Django)
- Design and implement asynchronous service communication using RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS.
- Work with NoSQL databases like MongoDB for data modeling and storage.
- Collaborate with Product, QA, and DevOps teams to deliver reliable, scalable features, representing backend engineering in cross-functional planning.
- Write clean, testable, well-documented code with unit and integration tests - staying hands-on as an active contributor, not just a reviewer.
- Participate in system architecture design, code reviews, and performance tuning.
- Set and uphold engineering standards and best practices across your team.
- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers - owning hiring decisions, performance management, career development, and day-to-day team health.
- Partner closely with Talent/Recruiting to define hiring needs, shape interview processes, and build out the backend engineering team as we scale.
Qualifications:- 12+ years of experience with Java and Spring Boot, including experience in a technical leadership or people management role
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field.
- Demonstrated experience managing, mentoring, and growing backend engineers, including hiring and performance management.
- Proven ability to influence technical direction and drive architectural decisions at a team or organizational level.
- Strong stakeholder management skills - able to represent backend engineering's perspective persuasively in front of executives, PMs, and cross-functional partners.
- Comfort operating in a fast paced environment - wearing multiple hats across engineering, hiring, and cross-functional work
- Experience partnering with Talent/Recruiting to build and scale engineering teams - defining roles, running hiring processes, and closing candidates.
- Strong experience with building and consuming REST APIs.
- Hands-on experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS.
- Familiarity with MongoDB or other NoSQL database technologies.
- Experience integrating and leveraging AI-assisted development tools such as Claude and Opencode to accelerate backend development, including code generation, debugging, and optimization of APIs and services.
- Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into the software development lifecycle, using Claude or Opencode for tasks like automated code reviews, documentation generation, and improving system design efficiency.
- Solid understanding of Git, CI/CD workflows, and agile development practices.
- Excellent debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills.
Benefits and Perks:- Annual company offsites
- Competitive Salary
- Gym reimbursement
- Commute reimbursement
- Flexible working hours
- Professional development stipend
- Flexible time off
- Cell phone service (up to $100/mo)
$180,000 - $240,000 a year
Think you're a fit? Apply to learn more!
