Backend Lead

About the Role :

We are looking for an experienced Backend Lead to take ownership of core server-side systems powering a modern, scalable digital platform.

The role involves leading backend architecture, designing highly reliable APIs and services, improving system performance, and establishing strong engineering standards. You will serve as a technical anchor for the backend team while remaining hands-on with critical system design and engineering decisions.

You will work closely with Frontend, Mobile, and DevOps teams to build backend systems that are scalable, secure, observable, and resilient under real-world production loads.

Key Responsibilities :

System Design & Backend Architecture :

- Design and evolve APIs, data models, caching strategies, and message-driven architectures.

- Own the performance, scalability, and reliability of backend systems.

- Define and monitor service-level objectives (SLOs) and proactively address system degradation.

- Make key architectural decisions around databases, query optimisation, indexing, caching, and data partitioning.

- Design and maintain reliable payment integrations with appropriate security, idempotency, and reconciliation mechanisms.

- Build backend systems capable of handling high-volume production workloads.

Engineering Quality & Standards :

- Establish and maintain backend coding, testing, and engineering standards.

- Drive unit, integration, and contract testing practices across backend services.

- Lead backend code reviews and provide actionable technical feedback.

- Improve observability through effective logging, monitoring, alerting, and tracing.

- Lead backend-specific incident reviews and postmortems, ensuring root causes are addressed through sustainable engineering solutions.

Technical Leadership & Mentoring :

- Mentor and technically guide junior and mid-level backend engineers.

- Help engineers improve their system design, debugging, and production engineering capabilities.

- Participate in technical hiring, including defining evaluation standards, conducting technical interviews, and providing structured feedback.

- Collaborate with DevOps teams on infrastructure sizing, deployment reliability, and cloud-cost optimisation.

- Work cross-functionally with engineering teams to ensure consistent architecture and technical standards.

Must-Have Skills & Experience :

- 6 - 10 years of backend engineering experience, with demonstrated ownership of complex and scalable systems.

- Strong hands-on expertise in Node.js and TypeScript.

- Strong understanding of both relational and non-relational databases, including appropriate use cases and optimisation techniques.

- Practical experience with Redis or similar caching technologies.

- Experience with message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS SQS, or equivalent.

- Hands-on experience integrating payment gateways, including understanding of idempotency, transaction reliability, security, and reconciliation.

- Experience with Stripe or similar payment platforms is preferred.

- Strong experience building and maintaining production-scale RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs.

- Strong hands-on experience with AWS, particularly services such as Lambda, DynamoDB, RDS, ElastiCache, SES/SNS, and API Gateway.

- Familiarity with event-driven architecture and programming.

- Experience with observability and monitoring tools such as Datadog, Splunk, CloudWatch, and Grafana.

- Strong understanding of backend performance optimisation, reliability, and production debugging.

Nice-to-Have :

- Experience building booking, availability, inventory, or transaction-heavy systems.

- Experience working with high-concurrency or high-throughput backend systems.

- Experience designing distributed systems and event-driven architectures.

- Experience working in a product-focused engineering environment.

What Success Looks Like :

- Core APIs consistently meet defined p95/p99 latency SLOs, including during peak loads.

- Backend test coverage and observability improve significantly within the first six months.

- Payment integrations operate reliably with zero reconciliation errors over a rolling quarter.

- Junior and mid-level engineers demonstrate measurable improvement in system design and production engineering capabilities.

- Backend incidents lead to systemic improvements rather than temporary fixes.

Key Performance Indicators :

- API Latency - p95 / p99

- API Error Rates

- Database Throughput & Performance

- Backend Reliability

- Production Incident Count

- Test Coverage & Observability

- Payment Reconciliation Accuracy

Interview Process :

1. Introductory & Background Discussion

2. System Design Interview - Booking, availability, and payment architecture

3. Performance Tuning Case Study - Diagnose and optimise a slow query or API

4. Code Review Exercise - Review a backend PR and provide structured technical feedback

5. Culture & Team Fit Discussion - Interaction with senior technology leadership