Lead Backend Engineer

• The Lead Backend Engineer owns the growth and output of a backend engineering pod — hiring, developing, and managing a small team — while remaining a strong hands-on contributor and a voice in technical direction. This is a player-coach role: you’ll write code and review architecture alongside your team, not just direct it from a distance, while also partnering with Talent to build out the team and with Engineering leadership to shape where the backend goes next
• Build and lead a team – hire, mentor, and grow a high‑performing group of backend engineers as we scale
• Shape technical direction – influence architecture, tooling, and roadmap decisions across backend systems
• Stay hands‑on – architect optimal solutions to our business problems and ship features alongside your team
• Scale our systems – help us grow to tens of millions of customers and connected devices
• Raise the bar – build quality tools and frameworks to ensure a high‑quality product
• Protect reliability – build systems to ensure continuous uptime
• Influence technical direction and architectural decisions across backend systems – balancing pragmatism with long‑term scalability
• Champion a bias toward action – prototype to resolve disagreements, ship incrementally, and avoid analysis paralysis on reversible decisions
• Model high autonomy for your team – make sound judgment calls without unnecessary approval layers, while remaining accountable for outcomes
• Continuously improve systems beyond your immediate scope – identify and fix inefficiencies, technical debt, or brittle abstractions wherever you find them, regardless of team ownership
• Develop and maintain RESTful APIs using Java (Spring Boot or related web frameworks) or Python (Flask, Django)
• Design and implement asynchronous service communication using RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS
• Work with NoSQL databases like MongoDB for data modeling and storage
• Collaborate with Product, QA, and DevOps teams to deliver reliable, scalable features, representing backend engineering in cross‑functional planning
• Write clean, testable, well‑documented code with unit and integration tests – staying hands‑on as an active contributor, not just a reviewer
• Participate in system architecture design, code reviews, and performance tuning
• Set and uphold engineering standards and best practices across your team
• Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers – owning hiring decisions, performance management, career development, and day‑to‑day team health
• Partner closely with Talent/Recruiting to define hiring needs, shape interview processes, and build out the backend engineering team as we scale

Benefits

• Gym reimbursement
• Free cellular service on the best network in the US
• Free lunch in NYC office & fully stocked kitchen
• Metrocard reimbursement
• Flexible working hours

• Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into the software development lifecycle, using Claude or Opencode for tasks like automated code reviews, documentation generation, and improving system design efficiency
• Experience partnering with Talent/Recruiting to build and scale engineering teams – defining roles, running hiring processes, and closing candidates
• Hands‑on experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS
• Solid understanding of Git, CI/CD workflows, and agile development practices
• Proven ability to influence technical direction and drive architectural decisions at a team or organizational level
• Strong stakeholder management skills – able to represent backend engineering’s perspective persuasively in front of executives, PMs, and cross‑functional partners
• 12+ years of experience with Java and Spring Boot, including experience in a technical leadership or people management role
• Strong experience with building and consuming REST APIs
• Demonstrated experience managing, mentoring, and growing backend engineers, including hiring and performance management
• Excellent debugging, problem‑solving, and communication skills
• Experience integrating and leveraging AI‑assisted development tools such as Claude and Opencode to accelerate backend development, including code generation, debugging, and optimization of APIs and services
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
• Familiarity with MongoDB or other NoSQL database technologies
• Comfort operating in a fast‑paced environment – wearing multiple hats across engineering, hiring, and cross‑functional work