Backend Lead

Role Summary

We are seeking a Backend Lead at the Senior Staff Engineer level to provide technical leadership across our backend architecture. This is a senior individual-contributor role with broad scope, responsible for shaping engineering strategy, driving cross-team technical initiatives, and setting the long-term architectural vision for backend systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and own the long-term technical architecture and strategy across multiple backend systems
• Act as a technical authority, resolving the most complex and ambiguous engineering challenges
• Drive cross-team initiatives involving platform scalability, reliability, and system-wide performance
• Establish engineering standards, governance, and best practices at an organisational level
• Provide technical mentorship to Staff Engineers, Tech Leads, and senior engineers across teams
• Partner with senior leadership (Engineering, Product, Security) to align technical strategy with business objectives
• Lead evaluation and adoption of new technologies, frameworks, and architectural patterns
• Anticipate scaling challenges and proactively design solutions ahead of business growth
• Lead root-cause analysis and resolution for major production incidents
• Influence hiring strategy and engineering culture at a senior level

Required Qualifications

• 7-10 + years of backend engineering experience, including 3+ years operating at a Staff level or above
• Demonstrated experience architecting large-scale, highly available distributed systems
• Deep expertise in backend languages, frameworks, and database technologies (SQL and NoSQL)
• Proven track record of leading cross-functional, multi-team technical initiatives
• Strong experience with cloud-native architectures, container orchestration, and infrastructure automation
• Exceptional system design skills, including experience with high-throughput, low-latency systems
• Strong stakeholder management and executive communication skills
• Experience shaping engineering strategy and influencing decisions beyond a single team

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience scaling engineering organizations through hyper-growth phases
• Public speaking, technical writing, or open-source contributions demonstrating thought leadership
• Experience with multi-region, globally distributed systems
• Background in platform or infrastructure engineering at scale
• Aviation domain experience