Backend Architect

DEPARTMENT: Engineering

REPORTS TO: Head of Engineering

About the Role:

Client Company is building a media super-app bringing together video, audio, radio, micro-drama, news and commerce on a single platform. We're hiring a Backend Architect to own the technical architecture for our backend platform spanning 22+ services across content, discovery, commerce and platform APIs.

This is a foundational, individual-contributor technical leadership role. You will define how a single backend platform scales to serve six content and commerce verticals, setting the technical direction that the wider Backend Engineering team builds against.

Key Responsibilities:

- Define and own the backend technical architecture across core platform, content & discovery, commerce & growth, and platform services

- Set technical standards, code quality bars and architectural guardrails for the Backend Engineering team

- Make foundational technology decisions service boundaries, data modeling, API design, caching and scalability strategy that keep the backend platform coherent as new verticals are added

- Own the architecture for core services including authentication, user profile, feed, recommendations, search and content APIs

- Define application-level security standards authentication, authorization and data protection in partnership with the Platform Engineer

- Own deployment architecture and release strategy for backend services, in partnership with the Platform Engineer

- Partner closely with the Frontend Architect and Platform Engineer to define clean API contracts and integration patterns

- Partner with the Tech Lead to translate architectural direction into a deliverable roadmap

- Conduct architecture and code reviews for high-impact changes

- Evaluate and introduce new backend technologies and tools where they meaningfully improve velocity, performance or maintainability

- Own backend performance, scalability and technical debt strategy as the platform scales beyond Phase 1

Required Qualifications:

- 810 years of backend engineering experience, including at least 23 years in a formal architecture or staff/principal engineering capacity

- Deep, hands-on expertise designing and scaling distributed backend systems and RESTful/GraphQL APIs

- Proven experience architecting backend platforms that serve multiple products or business verticals from a shared set of services

- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud provider (GCP, AWS or Azure) for deploying and operating production systems

- Strong understanding of application security best practices authentication, authorization, data protection and secure API design

- Experience with modern deployment and orchestration technologies such as Kubernetes, Docker and CI/CD pipelines

- Proficiency in at least one modern backend programming language (e.g. Go, Java, Node.js or Python) used in production at scale

- Strong understanding of data modeling, caching strategies, service decomposition and system scalability trade-offs

- Experience owning technical architecture for consumer-scale products with high read/write throughput

- Comfortable operating as a high-impact individual contributor, leading through technical authority and influence

- Excellent communication skills able to document and evangelize architectural decisions to engineers and non-technical stakeholders alike

Preferred Qualifications:

- Experience in a media, content or commerce super-app environment

- Prior experience at a high-growth startup building 01 platforms

- Familiarity with recommendation systems, search infrastructure or content delivery at scale

- Experience with cloud-native architecture (GCP preferred) and microservices design patterns