Tech Lead Backend
About the role
We are hiring a Principal Backend Engineer / Technical Lead to become the technical owner of our backend platform and help shape the future of our engineering organization. This is far more than a traditional senior backend developer position. You’ll work directly alongside the founder, gradually taking ownership of many of the day-to-day technical responsibilities that currently sit with him. While remaining highly hands-on, you’ll also help coordinate engineering efforts, guide architectural decisions, mentor senior engineers, and bridge communication between engineering and the wider business. You’ll play a key role in modernizing a mature SaaS platform, reducing technical debt, and leading the transition toward a new cloud-native architecture through incremental migration rather than a complete rewrite. This is an excellent opportunity for someone who enjoys combining deep technical work with technical leadership and wants to have genuine influence over the future direction of both the product and engineering team.
What you'll do
- Technical Leadership
- Become the technical owner of the backend platform alongside the founder
- Help drive architectural decisions and long-term technical strategy
- Coordinate technical initiatives across Backend, Frontend, Data Engineering, and DevOps teams
- Mentor and support senior engineers while promoting engineering best practices
- Balance technical excellence with business priorities when making architectural decisions
- Help shape engineering standards, tooling, and development processes
- Evaluate and introduce modern engineering practices, including AI-assisted development workflows
- Backend Engineering
- Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs
- Lead the modernization of the existing platform while minimizing migration risk
- Develop cloud-native backend services using Python and modern backend frameworks
- Build and optimize asynchronous processing pipelines and data-heavy services
- Ensure systems remain scalable, secure, reliable, and highly performant
- Improve platform observability, resilience, and maintainability
- Contribute to reducing technical debt and simplifying complex systems
- Architecture & Platform Evolution
- Help define the next-generation platform architecture
- Lead incremental migration from the existing platform to the new architecture
- Evaluate new technologies and architectural approaches
- Ensure high engineering standards across performance, scalability, reliability, and security
- Work closely with the founder to evolve technical strategy as the business scales
- Cross-Functional Collaboration
- Partner closely with Product, Engineering, and Leadership teams
- Translate business priorities into technical solutions
- Facilitate technical discussions across the engineering organization
- Support planning, prioritization, and technical decision-making
- Foster strong collaboration and transparent communication across teams
Requirements
- Backend Engineering
- 8+ years of software engineering experience
- Strong commercial experience with Python in production environments
- Strong experience designing and building RESTful API-driven systems
- Experience building scalable SaaS platforms
- Strong understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous processing
- Experience working with large datasets and data processing pipelines
- Strong SQL and PostgreSQL experience
- Experience designing maintainable, scalable backend architectures
- Cloud & Infrastructure
- Strong experience working with cloud-native applications
- Commercial experience with GCP (preferred) or AWS
- Experience with Kubernetes and containerized deployments
- Experience with Docker
- Experience with Infrastructure-as-Code principles
- Strong understanding of scalable cloud architecture
- Architecture & Leadership
- Experience designing software architecture for production systems
- Experience reducing technical debt and modernizing existing platforms
- Experience mentoring or leading engineering teams
- Experience making architectural decisions balancing technical and commercial needs
- Ability to influence engineering direction while remaining hands-on
- Engineering Practices
- Strong Git and collaborative development workflows
- Experience working within Agile environments
- Strong understanding of software design principles and clean architecture
- Comfortable evaluating and adopting modern AI-assisted engineering workflows
About Cloud Employee
Cloud Employee, is a UK-owned business established 8 years ago. We connect high-performing software engineer talent worldwide with some of the world’s leading and most innovative tech companies. Developers join to work as part of international engineering teams and grow their CV and skill set. We pride ourselves on being a supportive and cutting-edge workplace that continuously invests in staff development, engagement, and well-being. We provide security, and career paths, along with individual training programs and mentoring.
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