About the Role
Join us as a Backend Lead and drive the development of the backend platform behind one of the fastest-growing AI products in the US market. We are looking for a strong technical leader who combines deep expertise in high-load system architecture with hands-on experience in building and scaling engineering teams. In this role, you will have true ownership of our AI Gateway, generative pipelines, and mission-critical backend services powering a product already trusted by more than 1.5 million users.
Your key responsibilities
- Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and engineers' performance management
- Define the architectural vision and ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform
- Develop and evolve our AI orchestration layer across multiple models and providers, optimizing generation quality, latency, and cost efficiency
- Own the evolution of the AI Gateway — the core platform component powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation
- Scale infrastructure and backend services to support product growth and increasing workloads
- Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and operational excellence
- Deliver strategic AI initiatives, including our proprietary RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities
- Collaborate closely with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve business goals
- Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure capacity planning and cost optimization
What we’re looking for
- 7+ years of commercial experience with Node.js
- 3+ years of experience in a Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager role with direct people management responsibilities
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with NestJS
- Proven experience designing and evolving microservice architectures in production environments
- Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis
- Experience working with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle
- Hands-on experience with AWS services, including EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, and OpenSearch
- Strong Docker expertise
- Experience designing reliable, scalable, and observable distributed systems
- Solid understanding of on-call processes and incident management practices
AI expertise we value
- Commercial experience integrating AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others)
- Understanding of multi-model orchestration, including routing, fallback strategies, and cost/latency trade-offs
- Understanding of RAG, embeddings, MCP, and AI agents