Backend Tech Lead

A Backend Tech Lead at Accellor owns the design, delivery, and long-term health of scalable, distributed backend systems while leading and growing the engineers who build them. This is a hands-on technical role with real people-management responsibility: you set technical direction, drive delivery across one or more squads, and actively mentor and unblock the engineers reporting into you. You are equally comfortable in a design review, a 1:1, and a production incident. Responsibilities Technical Leadership & Architecture • Own the architecture for backend services and platforms — microservices boundaries, API contracts, data models, and inter-service communication patterns. • Make and document key technical decisions (build vs. buy, sync vs. async, consistency vs. availability trade-offs) and align teams around them. • Set and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing strategy, observability, and operational readiness. People & Team Leadership • Directly manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers, including running 1:1s, setting goals, giving feedback, and supporting career development. • Plan, distribute, and track work across the team — breaking down epics, sequencing delivery, and removing blockers so the team ships predictably. • Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through pairing, code review, and design coaching, raising the bar for the whole team rather than being the single point of delivery. • Partner with product, architecture, and other engineering leads to translate business goals into technical roadmaps and realistic commitments. Delivery & Engineering Execution • Lead by example with hands-on contribution to high-impact and complex parts of the codebase. • Design and operate microservices: service decomposition, API design (REST/gRPC/GraphQL), versioning, and backward compatibility. • Build event-driven and asynchronous workflows using message queues and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar). • Design data persistence and caching strategies across relational and NoSQL stores, with appropriate use of caching layers (Redis/Memcached) for performance and scale. Scalability, Reliability & Security • Ensure systems are designed for scale, resilience, and graceful degradation — load balancing, rate limiting, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotency. • Drive observability across services: structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing, and actionable alerting. • Enforce backend security best practices: authentication/authorization (OAuth2, OIDC, JWT), least-privilege access, secrets management, and secure handling of data in transit and at rest. • Own production quality — on-call leadership, incident response, root-cause analysis, and follow-through on remediation. Collaboration & Governance • Collaborate with DevOps and platform teams on CI/CD, containerization, and deployment strategy for backend services. • Recommend and implement standards for code organization, service ownership, and technical governance across teams. • Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field. • 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and operating production backend systems at scale. • Demonstrated experience leading both projects and people — owning end-to-end delivery for a team, managing engineers directly, and mentoring juniors. You must be able to point to specific teams you’ve grown and projects you’ve driven to delivery. • Languages & Frameworks: Deep expertise in at least one major backend stack (e.g., Java/Spring Boot, Go, Python, Node.js, or C#/.NET) and the ability to work fluently across more than one. • Distributed Systems & Microservices: Strong, demonstrable experience designing and operating microservices and distributed systems in production. • APIs: Hands-on expertise designing and evolving APIs (REST, gRPC, or GraphQL), including contracts, versioning, and documentation. • Messaging & Async: Practical experience with message queues / event streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, etc.). • Data: Strong SQL skills and solid experience with relational databases, plus working knowledge of NoSQL stores and data modeling for scale. • Caching: Hands-on experience with caching strategies and tools (Redis, Memcached). • Containers & Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Docker and Kubernetes. • Networking: Solid understanding of networking fundamentals — HTTP/HTTPS, TLS, DNS, service discovery, and load balancing. • Version Control & Practices: Strong Git/GitOps proficiency and a deep commitment to code review, testing, and CI/CD. • Cloud: Demonstrable experience building backend systems on at least one major cloud platform (AWS, Azure, or GCP). Preferred • Experience with service mesh, API gateways, or platform/internal-developer-platform tooling. • Experience with performance profiling, load testing, and capacity planning. • Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code and partnering closely with DevOps/SRE. • Exposure to AI-driven or data-intensive backend workloads, as Accellor increasingly integrates backend engineering with AI-powered platform delivery.