Posted today · be early
Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead
Stellar Tech
WorldwideremotePosted today
Skill Required
Back-End-LeadTechnical-LeadBackend-EngineerPython-DeveloperSoftware-EngineerTech-Lead-BackendBackend-Engineering-LeadLead-Backend-EngineeringBackend-Team-LeadLead-Backend-DevelopmentLead-Backend-DeveloperBackend-Engineering-LeadershipBackend-Engineering-ManagerBackend-Development-ManagerSOCtroubleshootingData WarehousingPrototypingEngineeringR ProgrammingPostgreSQLObservabilitydesigningdebuggingRabbitMQbuildingQuery OptimizationFastAPIMongoDBTestNGPythondesignDevOpsKafkaCI/CDCloudjQueryAPIsSQLContract
Key highlights
- Required Experience: 7+ years backend engineering, 2+ years in Lead role
- Key Tech: Python, FastAPI, MongoDB, PostgreSQL
- Key Benefit: Global remote work (compatible time zone)
- Notable Requirement: Concrete AI-First Engineering experience
Role overview
International fast-growing IT company StellarTech is looking for a Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead / Player-Coach to own the technical direction, engineering quality, and operational health of their backend ecosystem. This is a hands-on player-coach role combining backend architecture, technical execution, engineering leadership, and people management within a cross-functional product environment. The role involves leading a small team of experienced backend engineers while remaining actively involved in technical design, critical implementation, code reviews, production troubleshooting, and technical research, taking responsibility for product delivery, reliability, and long-term technical sustainability.
Responsibilities
- Own the backend technical direction and architecture across our product ecosystem.
- Translate product initiatives into technical solutions: clarify requirements, assess feasibility, identify risks, prepare technical designs, and decompose work for the team.
- Own the complete engineering lifecycle from refinement and solution design to implementation, release, monitoring, and production improvements.
- Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend solutions aligned with product and business needs.
- Build and evolve shared backend capabilities, reusable components, and platform solutions that allow the company to launch and scale multiple products efficiently.
- Define service boundaries, data ownership, APIs, integration patterns, and communication between systems.
- Make and defend pragmatic architectural decisions, including: Monolith vs services; Synchronous vs asynchronous communication; SQL vs NoSQL; Build vs buy; Short-term delivery vs long-term technical sustainability.
- Remain hands-on with Python and FastAPI through critical implementation, prototyping, debugging, code reviews, and technical research.
- Lead the design of event-driven and asynchronous workflows, including retries, idempotency, ordering, failure handling, and message processing.
- Own backend production readiness and operational health, including monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards, SLIs/SLOs, runbooks, incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements.
- Establish clear ownership of backend services and ensure the team can support them without dependency on individual engineers.
- Improve engineering practices covering refinement, technical design, Definition of Done, testing, code review, CI/CD, release safety, documentation, and technical debt management.
- Introduce and scale AI-assisted and agentic development workflows across the backend team.
- Evaluate how AI tools affect delivery speed, engineering quality, maintainability, and team productivity.
- Lead and develop backend engineers through delegation, regular feedback, one-to-one meetings, mentoring, performance reviews, and career development.
- Collaborate closely with Product, Platform, DevOps, QA, Frontend, and other engineering leads.
- Take responsibility for product and business outcomes, not only technical implementation.
Requirements
- 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
- 2+ years of experience in a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or Backend Lead role.
- Strong and recent hands-on production experience with Python, ideally 5+ years.
- Strong knowledge of modern Python backend development practices.
- Production experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks.
- Experience with asynchronous programming, testing, typing, profiling, debugging, and maintainable application design.
- Proven experience owning backend architecture end to end, not only contributing to solutions designed by others.
- Experience making and defending architectural decisions with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholders.
- Experience building and operating scalable, high-load, or data-intensive production systems.
- Strong understanding of service design, system boundaries, data flows, integrations, and distributed system trade-offs.
- Strong experience with event-driven systems, asynchronous processing, and message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar.
- Good understanding of retries, idempotency, message ordering, delivery guarantees, dead-letter handling, and failure recovery.
- Strong database fundamentals, including: Data modelling; Transactions and isolation; Indexing; Locking and concurrency; Query plans; Performance diagnosis and optimisation.
- Production experience with MongoDB and an understanding of its modelling, consistency, and scaling trade-offs.
- Production experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
- Experience designing APIs and integrating external platforms, third-party services, and payment or subscription systems.
- Strong production ownership mindset, including monitoring, alerting, debugging, incident investigation, and reliability improvements.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerised applications, deployment tooling, and CI/CD.
- Ability to reason about deployment safety, rollbacks, scalability, resource limits, and system capacity.
- Proven experience improving an engineering process, technical area, or system from an unclear or immature state to a measurable target state.
- Ability to balance product delivery speed with architecture quality and long-term maintainability.
- Experience leading experienced engineers without micromanagement.
- Experience with delegation, performance feedback, team development, and technical ownership distribution.
- Strong ownership, initiative, structured communication, and ability to make decisions under uncertainty.
- AI-First Engineering Experience: ability to provide concrete examples of using AI in an end-to-end software delivery workflow, such as: Spec-driven or context-driven development; AI coding agents; Automated code review; Test and documentation generation; Reusable repository or company-level AI context; Agentic pipelines and workflow automation; AI-assisted debugging and incident investigation; Evaluations and quality gates; Security and data privacy controls; Measuring the impact of AI adoption on delivery speed and quality; Introducing AI workflows across an engineering team.
Nice to have
- Experience building multi-product, multi-tenant, or platform-based architectures.
- Experience creating internal frameworks, service templates, or reusable backend components.
- Experience scaling products without proportional growth of the engineering team.
- Experience with AWS, including S3, Lambda, ECS, EKS, or related services.
- Experience with Redis.
- Hands-on Kubernetes experience.
- Strong Docker experience.
- Experience with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD tooling.
- Experience with Temporal or another workflow orchestration platform.
- Experience applying DDD, CQRS, event sourcing, or similar architectural patterns pragmatically.
- Experience with B2C, EdTech, subscriptions, payments, analytics, or mobile-first products.
- Experience working in an early-stage or fast-changing product environment.
Benefits
- Innovative environment: building and scaling EdTech products while actively experimenting with new technologies and development approaches.
- Global remote work: Work with an international team from anywhere within a compatible time zone.
- Health support: Company-provided medical expense compensation.
- AI tools: Company-provided AI subscriptions and other engineering tools.
- Flexible time off: 21 days of annual leave plus 10 bank holidays.
- Collaborative culture: Work alongside experienced and motivated professionals who value ownership, speed, and measurable results.
- Real influence: Help define the backend strategy, engineering standards, and AI-first development practices of a growing product ecosystem.
Additional details
- This role is a good fit for someone who: Remains a strong hands-on backend engineer; Enjoys combining coding, architecture, and leadership; Can independently assess the current technical state and define a better target state; Creates engineering processes rather than only following existing ones; Takes ownership of services after they are released to production; Can make pragmatic architectural decisions without unnecessary complexity; Thinks about product and business outcomes, not only implementation; Can set a technical standard for experienced engineers; Is comfortable challenging existing decisions and defending a well-reasoned position; Sees AI as a way to redesign engineering workflows, not only generate code; Is ready to lead both technology and people.
- Interview Process: HR interview, Technical Interview, Leadership Interview, Final interview.
- Originally posted on Himalayas
