Lead Backend Engineer - Fully Remote
$120,000–$120,000 year
RemoteUnited States
Job Summary
Lead and mentor a team of four to five mid-to-senior backend engineers through 1:1s, feedback, and performance management. Translate product and business goals into clear technical roadmaps, sprint plans, and high-quality execution for mobile-first apps used by tens of thousands of daily active users. Own the Ruby on Rails architecture, drive feature development, and make critical decisions on scalability, performance, and AWS infrastructure. Resolve production incidents, optimize API speed, and establish improved engineering processes, code reviews, and CI pipelines. Handle prioritization in a fast-moving environment with changing quarterly priorities. Fully remote contract role with a base salary up to $120,000 USD, including 30k USD bonuses, 27 days of paid vacation, and company-paid team trips.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of professional backend development experience in production environments
- Most recent experience in leading a backend team
- Proven experience owning backend architecture for a mobile-first, consumer-facing app
- Strong hands-on expertise with any OOP language
- Must be willing to work with Ruby on Rails
- Experience building and scaling high-traffic systems (Over 10k+ daily active users) with a focus on performance and reliability
- Solid understanding of distributed systems, relational databases, caching, and performance optimization
- Practical experience working in the cloud (preferably AWS) and collaborating closely with DevOps / infrastructure engineers
- Excellent communication skills with the ability to explain complex technical topics and trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
- Background in a startup or fast-moving product companies
- Comfortable with changing priorities and making pragmatic trade-offs
- Strong product mindset, user-focused, impact-driven, and able to connect technical decisions to business outcomes
- Comfortable taking ownership, making decisions, and leading in a fully remote, distributed team environment
Desired Qualifications
- Experience leading a backend team and with an OOP language
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