We are seeking a Lead Backend Engineer to take ownership of the systems that power our AI-driven platform. This role goes beyond traditional backend developmentyoull architect and build highly scalable, data-intensive systems and deliver end-to-end solutions that integrate tightly with product, design, and data science teams.

Youll lead the technical foundation of backend engineering : shaping our platform architecture, evolving our data infrastructure, and optimizing APIs and pipelines to serve personalized experiences, analytics, and real-time AI capabilities. Were looking for a strong individual contributor and technical leader who thrives in a fast-paced, startup environment with ownership, experimentation, and impact as core values.

Key Responsibilities :

- Lead the design, development, deployment, and maintenance of backend features from data ingestion to customer-facing APIs and dashboards.

- Define and evolve the architecture of our backend systems to ensure scalability, resilience, and performance.

- Build core infrastructure to support AI/ML-powered features, including recommendation engines, content pipelines, feature stores, and serving layers.

- Develop and document scalable RESTful or GraphQL APIs that power web and mobile experiences.

- Build real-time and batch data processing pipelines, integrate with streaming platforms (Kafka, etc.), and manage structured and unstructured data stores (SQL/NoSQL).

- Continuously monitor and improve the performance and cost-efficiency of our backend systems.

- Partner with product managers, designers, data scientists, and frontend engineers to deliver elegant solutions to complex business problems.

- Mentor team members, set engineering best practices, conduct code reviews, and help grow a high-performance backend team.

- Work in short iterations with a mindset for experimentation, shipping fast, and learning quickly.

Required Qualifications :

Technical Skills :

- Strong proficiency in backend programming languages such as Node.js, Python, Go, Java, or TypeScript (Node.js preferred).

- Solid grasp of computer science fundamentals data structures, algorithms, distributed systems, and systems design.

- Experience building and maintaining data-heavy applications analytics dashboards, data pipelines, ingestion frameworks, reporting APIs, or recommendation systems.

- Deep knowledge of databases both relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB).

- Hands-on experience with cloud platforms (AWS/GCP/Azure) and tools like Lambda, S3, ECS/Fargate, Pub/Sub, Cloud Functions, etc.

- Familiarity with event-driven architectures, message queues, or stream processing (Kafka, Kinesis, Pub/Sub).

- Understanding of API design best practices (REST, GraphQL), authentication protocols (OAuth, JWT), and microservices principles.

- Knowledge of CI/CD, containerization (Docker), and deployment automation