Lead Backend Engineer

We’re looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to take ownership of our backend systems and lead a team of experienced engineers. You’ll play a key role in shaping our architecture, mentoring senior developers, and working closely with product and design to deliver scalable, secure, and high-quality features. This is a strategic leadership role with hands-on technical involvement where needed. You’ll be responsible for steering our technical direction, ensuring engineering excellence, and helping the team grow and succeed.

Responsibilities

• Lead and mentor a team of 3 Senior Backend Engineers and 1 Senior DevOps Engineer.
• Make architectural and design decisions for critical backend systems.
• Set engineering standards and review code to ensure quality, security, and performance.
• Collaborate with product managers and designers to shape features from idea to implementation.
• Drive backend strategy and planning, balancing short-term delivery with long-term maintainability.
• Work with the DevOps engineer to ensure stable, observable, and scalable infrastructure (AWS/Terraform).
• Support a culture of continuous improvement, knowledge sharing, and technical excellence.
• Remain hands-on when necessary — reviewing pull requests, debugging complex issues, or prototyping new ideas.

• Extensive experience working with PHP and Laravel in production environments.
• Strong experience in a technical leadership role, managing and mentoring other engineers.
• Strong AWS experience, including EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch, and IAM.
• Solid Terraform skills, with experience managing infrastructure as code.
• Deep understanding of RESTful API design and backend architecture principles.
• Track record of making pragmatic, scalable architectural decisions within a monolithic codebase.
• Experience working with Agile methodologies (Scrum or Kanban).
• Strong collaboration and communication skills – you know how to work effectively with product managers, designers, and other teams.
• Familiarity with GitHub, Docker, and Sentry as part of your engineering workflow.

• Understanding of database performance tuning and query optimization (PostgreSQL or MySQL).
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment best practices