Backend Engineering Lead

Backend Engineering Lead

Hands-On Tech Lead · Architecture · Systems Quality Bar

This is a hands-on technical leadership role for engineers who have built backend systems at scale and are ready to set direction across APIs, workflows, integrations, data correctness, background jobs, platform logic, and operational reliability. You will spend most of your time in code and design — driving architecture, reviewing critical changes, and unblocking the team — while shaping how backend engineering is practiced here. We expect you to think in systems, reason through trade-offs in the open, and build foundations that remain reliable as complexity grows.

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience with deep Python proficiency and prior experience as a tech lead, staff engineer, or equivalent
• Track record of designing and operating non-trivial backend systems in production: APIs, event-driven workflows, integrations, data pipelines, and background processing
• Strong opinions on architecture, service boundaries, data modeling, and operational patterns — held loosely and explained well
• Comfortable going deep into code on the hardest problems while also lifting the team through reviews, design docs, and pairing
• Experience setting and enforcing engineering standards around correctness, testing, observability, and incident response
• Ability to work across the stack with frontend engineers, product managers, and operations teams, and translate business context into technical direction
• Experience with geospatial systems, financial rails, or large-scale data correctness problems is a plus

In the first 6 months, you will own the technical direction of at least one core area of the platform, raise the bar on how we design and review backend systems, and ship meaningful work yourself in the highest-leverage parts of the codebase. You will be the person other engineers go to for sharper judgment, and the systems you touch will be measurably more reliable, easier to reason about, and better instrumented than you found them.

Product decisions are tied to operational reality. Engineers are expected to understand workflows, not just APIs. Documentation, reviews, instrumentation, and iteration matter. Delivery is visible and predictable. Speed matters, but not at the cost of judgment. Leads here earn authority through code, design, and consistent follow-through — not through titles or process.

• Stay hands-on. Code, design, and reviews are the primary instruments of leadership.
• Understand the problem before architecting a solution.
• Care visibly about data correctness, edge cases, and production robustness.
• Raise the quality bar without becoming a bottleneck.
• Mentor through critique, design discussions, and example — not gatekeeping.
• Accept critique without ego and apply it to your own work first.
• Ship iteratively, measure impact, and own the operational outcome.