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:

We are looking for more than occasional chatbot usage or basic code generation.

A strong candidate should be able 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.
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.

Good Fit for This Role:

Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead

Summary