Lead Backend Engineer

Location: Hyderabad, India | Work Mode: Full-time, in-office

This is an 80% hands-on coding role. You will own backend architecture and technical execution across the product - designing systems, writing production code, and solving hard problems daily. The remaining 20% is technical leadership: setting engineering standards, reviewing architecture, and raising the bar for the backend team. If you have 10+ years of experience and still want to build, not just manage, this is the role.

• Design and build scalable APIs, distributed services, real-time systems, and backend infrastructure powering AI- and LLM-driven product capabilities
• Own the architecture and evolution of backend systems end-to-end: service boundaries, data pipelines, and platform integrations across service-based, serverless, and event-driven architectures
• Write production code daily in Node.js and TypeScript
• Design asynchronous workflows, messaging patterns, and multi-service orchestration
• Make consequential decisions on performance, scalability, reliability, security, observability, and caching
• Partner with product, frontend, and infrastructure on technical planning
• Raise the technical bar through code reviews, architectural guidance, and pairing with engineers
• Own production readiness, incident response, and monitoring
• Improve team velocity through better tooling, CI/CD practices, and AI-assisted development workflows

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience with sustained hands-on coding throughout
• Deep, current proficiency with Node.js and TypeScript in production; experience with NestJS or similar structured frameworks
• Track record of designing and operating distributed systems at meaningful scale
• Deep experience with both relational and NoSQL databases, including schema design, query optimization, and data modeling trade-offs
• Strong understanding of cloud-native infrastructure (AWS preferred), containerized deployments, and production operations
• Demonstrated ability to own system design decisions and defend architectural trade-offs
• Comfort balancing hands-on execution with technical leadership in a fast-moving startup environment
• Experience building backend systems for AI/LLM-powered product features
• Background in real-time systems, WebSockets, API gateway patterns, or high-throughput services
• Experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ), and streaming pipelines
• Comfort with AI-assisted development tools and workflows