Tech Lead - Backend
First seen by Alion on Aug 13, 2026.
Roles & Responsibilities :
Zenskar is building the operational backbone for how B2B enterprises run their business.
As a Tech Lead on the backend team, you will own the technical direction for a core domain of the platform - the systems where correctness is non-negotiable, scale is unforgiving, and the edge cases never stop coming while mentoring the Senior Engineers in your pod.
This is a hands-on role : you're writing code and designing systems yourself, day to day, while also pairing on hard problems, reviewing the work of the engineers around you, and being the person who figures out what's actually broken before it becomes a fire.s
You'll report into the Engineering Manager / Head of Engineering. This is not a feature-factory role. You are here to raise the level of abstraction the team works at, not to ship tickets faster.
What you'll own :
- Design and build core platform services that handle complex business logic reliably at scale.
- Architect and own integrations with external enterprise systems, each with their own quirks, rate limits, and failure modes.
- Build APIs that enterprise engineering teams actually want to integrate with, not just ones that technically work.
- Own production debugging end to end : diagnose issues across services using logs, traces, and metrics, and make incidents boring rather than fires.
- Embed security and compliance thinking into your systems by default, not as a retrofit.
- Mentor the Senior Backend Engineers in your pod : pair on hard problems, review their work, and help them grow as engineers.
- Set the architectural direction for your domain : choose the frameworks, patterns, and abstractions the team builds on, and make the calls that shape the platform for years.
- Lead design reviews and code reviews, and set the technical standard the rest of the team calibrates against.
- Hold a clear bar for quality, follow-through, and ownership across the engineers you work with, and make sure work is healthy in production, not just merged.
- Partner with product, implementation, and customer success as the engineer who understands the system deeply enough to push back when requirements are wrong.
- Raise the bar for the engineers around you without slowing the team down.
Ideal Candidate :
- 6+ years of overall Software Engineering/Development experience building production backend systems.
- Tech Lead ownership, with experience setting technical direction, architecture, frameworks, or engineering standards.
- Strong hands-on Backend development experience with deep proficiency in at least one backend programming language (Python, Java, Golang etc).
- Strong System design/distributed systems experience, including architectural trade-offs, scalability, failure modes, reliability, and long-term maintainability.
- Experience designing and building APIs, backend services, and external/enterprise integrations.
- Formal technical leadership experience, including mentoring Senior Engineers, conducting design/code reviews, and driving engineering quality.
- Hands-on IC + Tech Lead, with approximately 70-80% hands-on coding/engineering involvement.
- Experience with Kafka/NATS/RabbitMQ, AWS, Docker/Kubernetes, CI/CD, observability, security/compliance, multi-tenant systems, and financial/billing platforms.
Education :
- CS degree or equivalent (B.Tech/B.E./B.S.).
Skills
Java, Golang, Python, Distributed Systems, System Design, API