Backend Team Leader

Rapsodo is a global sports technology company with offices in Singapore, the United States, Türkiye, Japan, and Malaysia. We develop data-driven sports analytics products that combine computer vision, AI, hardware, and cloud technologies to help athletes measure, understand, and improve their performance.

Our products deliver accurate, real-time performance insights in demanding environments, supporting professional athletes, coaches, and sports organizations around the world.

At Rapsodo, engineers take ownership from concept to production, working across multidisciplinary teams to build innovative products that transform complex motion into actionable insights at global scale.

About the Role

We are looking for a Backend Team Leader to lead our backend engineering team and take ownership of the technical direction, development practices, and delivery of our backend services and APIs.

In this role, you will combine strong hands-on backend expertise with technical leadership and people management. Our backend services power sports devices, mobile apps, desktop applications, and web dashboards, and handle high volumes of real-time and analytical data. You will work closely with Product, Frontend, Mobile, Desktop, Firmware, DevOps, QA, and other engineering teams to build scalable, reliable, secure, and high-performance systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Lead and support the backend engineering team in delivering high-quality, scalable, and maintainable services.
• Provide technical direction and own backend architecture and technology decisions, including service boundaries, data models, API design, and integration patterns.
• Establish and maintain backend development standards, best practices, and coding guidelines.
• Participate in system design, code reviews, technical discussions, and architectural decisions.
• Work closely with Product, Frontend, Mobile, Desktop, Firmware, and QA teams to translate product requirements into effective technical solutions and well-defined APIs.
• Own backend development planning, prioritization, and delivery in collaboration with relevant stakeholders.
• Ensure the reliability, performance, security, and cost efficiency of backend services in production, including observability, incident response, and root cause analysis.
• Collaborate with the DevOps team on CI/CD, deployment strategies, infrastructure needs, and release management.
• Apply security and compliance best practices across services, data handling, authentication, and access control.
• Identify technical risks, dependencies, technical debt, and improvement opportunities, and proactively address them.
• Drive improvements in code quality, system performance, development processes, and engineering efficiency.
• Mentor and coach backend engineers through technical guidance, feedback, and knowledge sharing.
• Support the growth and development of team members and contribute to hiring and onboarding activities when needed.
• Foster a collaborative, accountable, and continuous-learning team culture.
• Stay current with modern backend technologies, cloud services, tools, and industry practices.
• Contribute hands-on to development, particularly in complex or technically critical areas.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
• Strong professional experience in backend software development.
• Strong proficiency in Go and/or Node.js (TypeScript), with the ability to work across both.
• Solid understanding of backend architecture, service design, data modeling, and distributed systems.
• Experience designing and maintaining REST and/or gRPC APIs consumed by web, mobile, and desktop clients.
• Strong experience with relational and NoSQL databases, data access patterns, and query performance.
• Experience with messaging and event-driven architectures (e.g., Pub/Sub, message queues) for ingesting and processing device and application data.
• Experience building backend services that communicate with connected devices, including knowledge of IoT protocols such as MQTT, device provisioning and authentication, telemetry ingestion, and handling intermittent connectivity.
• Experience building and operating scalable, production-grade services, including monitoring, logging, and troubleshooting in production.
• Experience building or supporting cloud-based applications and services, preferably in a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) environment.
• Experience with containerized deployments, CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and software engineering best practices.
• Good understanding of application security, authentication and authorization, and secure data handling.
• Previous experience leading a backend team or taking technical ownership of a backend product or domain.
• Experience mentoring and developing engineers.
• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively with both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Ability to balance technical quality, business priorities, and delivery timelines.

Nice to Have

• Experience working in product-focused, fast-paced technology environments and globally distributed engineering teams.
• Familiarity with microservices, Domain-Driven Design (DDD), modular monolith architectures, Kubernetes, and Infrastructure as Code.
• Experience with identity and authentication platforms such as Auth0 or Firebase Auth.
• Exposure to data pipelines, analytics, machine learning, computer vision, or other data-intensive applications.
• Experience with IoT or connected hardware products, including device data ingestion, firmware integration, and real-time data processing.
• Familiarity with GDPR or similar compliance frameworks and experience in sports technology or consumer products.