Backend Lead
First seen by Alion on Sep 19, 2026.
Backend Lead
About the Role :
We are looking for an experienced Backend Lead to take ownership of core server-side systems powering a modern, scalable digital platform.
The role involves leading backend architecture, designing highly reliable APIs and services, improving system performance, and establishing strong engineering standards. You will serve as a technical anchor for the backend team while remaining hands-on with critical system design and engineering decisions.
You will work closely with Frontend, Mobile, and DevOps teams to build backend systems that are scalable, secure, observable, and resilient under real-world production loads.
Key Responsibilities :
System Design & Backend Architecture :
- Design and evolve APIs, data models, caching strategies, and message-driven architectures.
- Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of backend systems.
- Define and monitor service-level objectives (SLOs) and proactively address system degradation.
- Make key architectural decisions around databases, query optimisation, indexing, caching, and data partitioning.
- Design and maintain reliable payment integrations with appropriate security, idempotency, and reconciliation mechanisms.
- Build backend systems capable of handling high-volume production workloads.
Engineering Quality & Standards :
- Establish and maintain backend coding, testing, and engineering standards.
- Drive unit, integration, and contract testing practices across backend services.
- Lead backend code reviews and provide actionable technical feedback.
- Improve observability through effective logging, monitoring, alerting, and tracing.
- Lead backend-specific incident reviews and postmortems, ensuring root causes are addressed through sustainable engineering solutions.
Technical Leadership & Mentoring :
- Mentor and technically guide junior and mid-level backend engineers.
- Help engineers improve their system design, debugging, and production engineering capabilities.
- Participate in technical hiring, including defining evaluation standards, conducting technical interviews, and providing structured feedback.
- Collaborate with DevOps teams on infrastructure sizing, deployment reliability, and cloud-cost optimisation.
- Work cross-functionally with engineering teams to ensure consistent architecture and technical standards.
Must-Have Skills & Experience :
- 6 - 10 years of backend engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex and scalable systems.
- Strong hands-on expertise in Node.js and TypeScript.
- Strong understanding of both relational and non-relational databases, including appropriate use cases and optimisation techniques.
- Practical experience with Redis or similar caching technologies.
- Experience with message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, or equivalent.
- Hands-on experience integrating payment gateways, including understanding of idempotency, transaction reliability, security, and reconciliation.
- Experience with Stripe or similar payment platforms is preferred.
- Strong experience building and maintaining production-scale RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs.
- Strong hands-on experience with AWS, particularly services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, ElastiCache, SES/SNS, and API Gateway.
- Familiarity with event-driven architecture and programming.
- Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, and Grafana.
- Strong understanding of backend performance optimisation, reliability, and production debugging.
Nice-to-Have :
- Experience building booking, availability, inventory, or transaction-heavy systems.
- Experience working with high-concurrency or high-throughput backend systems.
- Experience designing distributed systems and event-driven architectures.
- Experience working in a product-focused engineering environment.
What Success Looks Like :
- Core APIs consistently meet defined p95/p99 latency SLOs, including during peak loads.
- Backend test coverage and observability improve significantly within the first six months.
- Payment integrations operate reliably with zero reconciliation errors over a rolling quarter.
- Junior and mid-level engineers demonstrate measurable improvement in system design and production engineering capabilities.
- Backend incidents lead to systemic improvements rather than temporary fixes.
Key Performance Indicators :
- API Latency - p95 / p99
- API Error Rates
- Database Throughput & Performance
- Backend Reliability
- Production Incident Count
- Test Coverage & Observability
- Payment Reconciliation Accuracy
Interview Process :
1. Introductory & Background Discussion
2. System Design Interview - Booking, availability, and payment architecture
3. Performance Tuning Case Study - Diagnose and optimise a slow query or API
4. Code Review Exercise - Review a backend PR and provide structured technical feedback
5. Culture & Team Fit Discussion - Interaction with senior technology leadership
Skills
Node.js, TypeScript, AWS, RESTful API, Kafka, RabbitMQ, System Design, Backend Architecture