Senior Backend Engineer

We're looking for a Backend Technical Lead who can own the engineering vision for the platform end-to-end. This role is equal parts technical leadership, system & platform design, and people management.

You will define our engineering roadmap, raise the bar on architecture, improve developer productivity (increasingly with AI in the everyday development loop), mentor engineers, and ensure high-quality sprint delivery. This is ideal for someone who thinks in systems and enjoys combining hands-on coding with leadership.

Responsibilities:

• Own architecture end-to-end: design, build, and scale systems.
• Set the long-term technical direction.
• Lead initiatives around performance, security, observability, and platform reliability.
• Set standards for testing and code quality that hold up when a large share of code is agent-written.
• Drive adoption of engineering best practices and new tooling across the org.
• Mentor and lead engineers in the team.
• Own sprint planning, estimations, and delivery for engineering workstreams.
• Ensure predictable execution while balancing short-term needs with long-term tech health.

Requirements:

• 6 - 9 years building production-grade systems at scale.
• Expertise in at least one backend framework or language.
• Strong data modelling in both relational and document databases, and the judgment to know which one a problem wants.
• Fluency in the fundamentals: caching, queues and async work, idempotency, read scaling, concurrency and connection limits, and an accurate mental model of how databases perform under load.
• Ability to lead technical discussions, make trade-offs, and guide teams through ambiguity.
• Experience improving developer productivity through tooling, process, or automation.
• Comfort building product surfaces on top of LLMs - retrieval, structured extraction, evaluating output quality.
• Experience leading an engineering team or mentoring senior engineers.

Nice to have:

• Worked at a mid-stage startup.
• Experience with eCommerce, Marketplace, discovery, search or geospatial systems.
• Event-driven architecture and message queues at scale.
• Working effectively with AI coding agents: the scaffolding, tests and conventions that let them ship safely rather than just quickly.