Tech Lead - Backend Engineering

We are looking for a hands-on Tech Lead who will drive backend engineering design, architecture, development and team execution. You will actively code while mentoring and guiding a team of developers to deliver scalable, high-performance services at real-world traffic scale.
Responsibilities:
Predictable delivery of product features within agreed SLA, with high-quality code and extensible design.
Availability, reliability and performance of backend services in production.
Team throughput, code quality standards and adoption of engineering best practices.
Mentorship impact and growth of the engineers in the team.
Balancing hands-on individual contribution with leadership and mentoring responsibilities.
Delivering product features within stretched timelines while protecting system stability.
Building scalable systems for real-world traffic while managing technical debt.
Setting engineering culture and standards in a growing development centre.
Technical Leadership:
Lead and mentor a backend team of 3-4 engineers, providing technical direction and code reviews.
Architect, design, and implement distributed backend services with high availability and reliability.
Ensure high code quality, maintainability and engineering best practices across the team.
Drive continuous performance improvement, scalability and system stability.
Delivery and Ownership:
Own the end-to-end lifecycle of features from requirement gathering through production deployment and monitoring.
Collaborate closely with Product, DevOps and Frontend teams to ensure alignment on technical solutions.
Troubleshoot production issues and participate in the on-call rotation when required.
Team Building: Contribute to hiring, onboarding and performance evaluation of team members.
Requirements:
Strong backend development experience using Java and Node.js .
Expertise in designing and consuming REST APIs, with familiarity with microservice architectures.
Solid experience with PostgreSQL and MongoDB, including schema design and performance tuning.
Hands-on experience with Redis (caching, pub/sub).
Working knowledge of Kafka - message streaming and producer/consumer design patterns.
Experience with containerised deployments using Docker and familiarity with CI/CD workflows.
Understanding of distributed system concepts such as CAP theorem, eventual consistency and fault tolerance.
Experience with cloud platforms, particularly AWS.
Familiarity with monitoring tools such as Datadog.
Exposure to Domain-Driven Design (DDD) and event-driven architectures.
Strong ownership and accountability with a product-first mindset.
Excellent communication and stakeholder management.
Ability to balance hands-on coding with leadership and mentorship.
Problem-solving attitude with a focus on delivering outcomes, not just output.
6-8 years of backend engineering experience, including team leadership.

Skills
api, backend, java, microservices, node.js, nodejs, rest

Experience
6-8 yrs