Position Overview

The Lead Backend Software Engineer is responsible for leading the backend development team in delivering robust, scalable, and high-performance solutions for our productized services. This role balances day-to-day oversight of implementation work with short-term delivery management (2–6 weeks), ticket creation and technical breakdown, and supporting architecture decisions. The ideal candidate will have strong backend expertise, proven leadership skills, and the ability to coach and mentor developers while ensuring timely, high-quality releases. This role also works closely with the Frontend Lead to ensure seamless backend–frontend integration and must have hands-on experience developing LLM-based applications.

Key Responsibilities

Technical & Delivery Leadership

• Oversee the day-to-day activities of backend developers, ensuring work is progressing according to sprint or Kanban goals.
• Support short-term architecture and system design in collaboration with the Technical Lead.
• Ensure backend development follows established design patterns, coding standards, and security best practices.
• Act as the technical escalation point for backend-related blockers or complex issues.
• Define and enforce table-partitioning or data-chunking strategies so large datasets remain queryable and maintainable as volume grows.

Implementation Oversight & Quality

• Create and refine technical tickets in Asana in collaboration with Product Managers and the Frontend Lead to ensure backend requirements are well-defined and achievable.
• Translate product requirements into clear, actionable technical tasks for backend developers.
• Monitor and guide team members’ implementation across the 2–6 week delivery window.
• Drive systematic MySQL query optimisation through execution-plan analysis, indexing, and query rewriting to keep query latency within agreed performance thresholds.
• Oversee high-volume data-ingestion pipelines - batch and streaming - ensuring reliable processing, fault-tolerant delivery, and full observability.
• Conduct regular code reviews to ensure performance, maintainability, and security standards are met.
• Facilitate technical problem-solving sessions to remove delivery roadblocks quickly.
• Lead LLM API integrations (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic), covering prompt orchestration, usage tracking, and automated fallback to alternate providers or cached responses when a request fails.

Cross-Team Collaboration

• Work closely with the Frontend Lead to align backend APIs, services, and integrations with frontend needs.
• Partner with product managers and QA to ensure requirements are fully understood and implemented correctly.
• Collaborate with DevOps to optimize AWS deployments and improve CI/CD pipelines.
• Own external-service API integrations (auth, rate limits, versioning), ensuring resilient error handling and clearly defined performance targets.

Continuous Improvement & Team Growth

• Mentor and coach backend developers to improve skillsets and code quality.
• Identify and implement process improvements to increase delivery efficiency.
• Introduce and maintain tiered caching (e.g., Redis, CDN edge) to reduce primary-DB load and improve API response times.
• Stay up-to-date with emerging backend and LLM/AI development technologies and propose relevant adoption.

Documentation & Knowledge Sharing

• Maintain and improve backend system documentation.
• Ensure tickets include sufficient technical documentation for long-term maintainability.
• Promote a culture of transparency and knowledge sharing within the engineering team.

Qualifications

Required

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field (or equivalent experience).
• 7+ years of backend software development experience, with 2+ years in a technical leadership role.
• Proven record of collaborating on product development and driving architectural decisions that align engineering output with business goals.
• Strong proficiency in Laravel or a similar backend framework.
• Experience with SQL/NoSQL databases, RESTful API design, and backend integration with frontend applications.
• Hands-on experience developing LLM-based applications (e.g., using OpenAI API, LangChain, or similar frameworks).
• Experience with AWS (EC2, RDS, S3, Lambda, etc.).
• Proficiency with Git and agile development workflows, including Asana for task management.
• Strong mentorship skills and the ability to lead a team through complex technical challenges.
• Excellent debugging, performance tuning, and problem-solving skills.

Preferred

• Experience in saas or productized service delivery.
• Familiarity with Vue.js for backend–frontend integration.
• Certifications in backend development, AWS, or AI/ML.