Lead Software Engineer

Engineering Lead, Remote across Europe
Are you an Engineering Lead who wants full ownership of production on a platform processing 50 million background jobs a day?
It is a bootstrapped SaaS platform providing CRM, analytics and automation for creator agencies, with a new autonomous AI agent product driving most of its growth.
📍 Remote across Europe.
💷 €95,000 to €140,000 depending on experience, plus potential revenue share - Preference is B2B but they can work through a EoR too
🤝 Interview Process: 3 stages:
Introductory call with me. You will be fully briefed before you speak to anyone
Interview with the CTO, 30 to 60 minutes. An introduction, then a live technical problem solving session built around a real problem the team has faced
Final conversation with the CEO, 30 to 60 minutes
Tech Stack: Ruby on Rails, Sidekiq, PostgreSQL, React, Electron, dedicated servers on Hetzner and OVHcloud
This is a bootstrapped business, five years trading, a great ARR, with an established customer base and no investors to answer to. The founders are both still hands on. They are hiring their first senior engineer outside the two of them.
A PostgreSQL database holding over a terabyte of data
Around 50 million background jobs a day through Sidekiq, and more than 36 billion processed to date
Everything running on one primary server, 48 vCPU and 192GB RAM, with a separate worker server
An autonomous AI agent product that has roughly doubled recurring revenue in the past few months
The next step is scaling all of that beyond a single primary server, with the monitoring, recovery and review standards a business this size should already have. That is where you come in.
The Role:
You will own day to day technical delivery and production operations, so the founders can focus on product and growth.
This is hands on. Diagnosing problems, writing and reviewing code, directing technical work and following it through to release. You will get production access and be accountable for keeping the platform secure, fast and recoverable.
You will lead a small, fully remote engineering team technically. Formal people management stays with the CTO. Unresolved priority conflicts go to the CEO.
What You Will Be Doing:
Owning production: uptime, performance, security, backups, disaster recovery and incident response
Owning PostgreSQL performance, safe production migrations, data retention and recovery, including how analytical workloads are separated and older data archived
Owning the scaling plan as the platform moves beyond its current single primary server setup
Keeping Sidekiq processing reliable at current volumes and designing for what comes next
Reviewing pull requests from a team working heavily with AI tooling, and setting the standards, tests and guardrails that keep large AI generated changes safe to ship
Owning production incident response during agreed working hours, with backup and out of hours responsibilities shared across the team
Contributing to the AI agent product as it becomes the main revenue driver
Experience We Are Looking For:
Senior backend engineer or tech lead who has owned live, customer facing production systems and been the person called when they break
Deep PostgreSQL experience at scale: large datasets, query tuning, migrations on live tables, replication, backups and recovery. Over a terabyte of data should not worry you
Strong DevOps and infrastructure skills. You have scaled systems off a single server before and can plan the path without being told how
High volume background job processing. Sidekiq is ideal, and equivalent queueing systems are fine if you understand the failure modes
Hands on experience building with LLMs and using AI development tools. You can assess generated code critically and validate its behaviour
Experience leading technical delivery for a small distributed team. You delegate clearly, resolve blockers and follow work through without founders having to chase
Fluent English. The team is fully remote and distributed, so clear written communication matters
Nice To Have:
Recent Ruby on Rails experience. Strong backend engineers from similar languages are welcome
Experience introducing monitoring, alerting and incident runbooks somewhere that had none
90 Day Outcomes:
First 30 days: map the infrastructure, PostgreSQL setup and Sidekiq workload, address urgent capacity and security risks, validate backups with a restore test, and establish essential monitoring, alerts and incident ownership
Days 30 to 60: deliver the highest value reliability and capacity improvements, agree data retention, and establish a consistent review and release process
Days 60 to 90: deliver the next infrastructure improvements, support the AI agent roadmap, document operational procedures and get a second person able to operate critical systems
This is not for you if you want a pure management role, if you need a big platform team around you, or if you are sceptical about AI assisted development.
It is for you if you have run live systems at scale, you want to own production rather than ask permission, and you would rather set the standards than inherit someone else's.
Apply now for consideration

Work arrangement
Yes