Tech Lead - Backend Engineering

We are looking for a hands-on Tech Lead who will drive backend engineering design, architecture, development and team execution. You will actively code while mentoring and guiding a team of developers to deliver scalable, high-performance services at real-world traffic scale.

Responsibilities:

• Predictable delivery of product features within agreed SLA, with high-quality code and extensible design.
• Availability, reliability and performance of backend services in production.
• Team throughput, code quality standards and adoption of engineering best practices.
• Mentorship impact and growth of the engineers in the team.
• Balancing hands-on individual contribution with leadership and mentoring responsibilities.
• Delivering product features within stretched timelines while protecting system stability.
• Building scalable systems for real-world traffic while managing technical debt.
• Setting engineering culture and standards in a growing development centre.

Technical Leadership:

• Lead and mentor a backend team of 3-4 engineers, providing technical direction and code reviews.
• Architect, design, and implement distributed backend services with high availability and reliability.
• Ensure high code quality, maintainability and engineering best practices across the team.
• Drive continuous performance improvement, scalability and system stability.

Delivery and Ownership:

• Own the end-to-end lifecycle of features from requirement gathering through production deployment and monitoring.
• Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps and Frontend teams to ensure alignment on technical solutions.
• Troubleshoot production issues and participate in the on-call rotation when required.
• Team Building: Contribute to hiring, onboarding and performance evaluation of team members.

Requirements:

• Strong backend development experience using Java and Node.js .
• Expertise in designing and consuming REST APIs, with familiarity with microservice architectures.
• Solid experience with PostgreSQL and MongoDB, including schema design and performance tuning.
• Hands-on experience with Redis (caching, pub/sub).
• Working knowledge of Kafka - message streaming and producer/consumer design patterns.
• Experience with containerised deployments using Docker and familiarity with CI/CD workflows.
• Understanding of distributed system concepts such as CAP theorem, eventual consistency and fault tolerance.
• Experience with cloud platforms, particularly AWS.
• Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Datadog.
• Exposure to Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and event-driven architectures.
• Strong ownership and accountability with a product-first mindset.
• Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
• Ability to balance hands-on coding with leadership and mentorship.
• Problem-solving attitude with a focus on delivering outcomes, not just output.
• 6-8 years of backend engineering experience, including team leadership.