Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead

Job Description International fast-growing IT company StellarTech is looking for a Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead / Player-Coach. StellarTech is a fast-growing international product technology company looking for a Backend Lead to own the technical direction, engineering quality, and operational health of our backend ecosystem. This is a hands-on player-coach role combining backend architecture, technical execution, engineering leadership, and people management. You will lead a small team of experienced backend engineers while remaining actively involved in technical design, critical implementation, code reviews, production troubleshooting, and technical research. You will work in a cross-functional product environment and take responsibility not only for backend implementation, but also for product delivery, reliability, and long-term technical sustainability. What You’ll Do: - 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. What We’re Looking For: - 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. 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. Good Fit for This Role: 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. Why You’ll Love Working With Us: - Innovative environment: We are 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. Interview Process: - HR interview - Technical Interview - Leadership Interview - Final interview Originally posted on Himalayas