Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead

Job Description

International fast-growing IT company  StellarTech  is looking for a Backend Lead - Hands-on Tech Lead / Player-Coach. StellarTech is a fast-growing international product technology company looking for a Backend Lead to own the technical direction, engineering quality, and operational health of our backend ecosystem.

This is a  hands-on player-coach role combining backend architecture, technical execution, engineering leadership, and people management. You will lead a small team of experienced backend engineers while remaining actively involved in technical design, critical implementation, code reviews, production troubleshooting, and technical research.

You will work in a cross-functional product environment and take responsibility not only for backend implementation, but also for product delivery, reliability, and long-term technical sustainability.

What You’ll Do:

Own the backend technical direction and architecture across our product ecosystem.

Translate product initiatives into technical solutions: clarify requirements, assess feasibility, identify risks, prepare technical designs, and decompose work for the team.

Own the complete engineering lifecycle from refinement and solution design to implementation, release, monitoring, and production improvements.

Design scalable, reliable, and maintainable backend solutions aligned with product and business needs.

Build and evolve shared backend capabilities, reusable components, and platform solutions that allow the company to launch and scale multiple products efficiently.

Define service boundaries, data ownership, APIs, integration patterns, and communication between systems.

Make and defend pragmatic architectural decisions, including:

Monolith vs services.

Synchronous vs asynchronous communication.

SQL vs NoSQL.

Build vs buy.

Short-term delivery vs long-term technical sustainability.

Remain hands-on with Python and FastAPI through critical implementation, prototyping, debugging, code reviews, and technical research.

Lead the design of event-driven and asynchronous workflows, including retries, idempotency, ordering, failure handling, and message processing.

Own backend production readiness and operational health, including monitoring, logging, alerting, dashboards, SLIs/SLOs, runbooks, incident response, root-cause analysis, and post-incident improvements.

Establish clear ownership of backend services and ensure the team can support them without dependency on individual engineers.

Improve engineering practices covering refinement, technical design, Definition of Done, testing, code review, CI/CD, release safety, documentation, and technical debt management.

Introduce and scale AI-assisted and agentic development workflows across the backend team.

Evaluate how AI tools affect delivery speed, engineering quality, maintainability, and team productivity.

Lead and develop backend engineers through delegation, regular feedback, one-to-one meetings, mentoring, performance reviews, and career development.

Collaborate closely with Product, Platform, DevOps, QA, Frontend, and other engineering leads.

Take responsibility for product and business outcomes, not only technical implementation.

What We’re Looking For:

7+ years of backend engineering experience.

2+ years of experience in a Tech Lead, Team Lead, or Backend Lead role.

Strong and recent hands-on production experience with Python, ideally 5+ years.

Strong knowledge of modern Python backend development practices.

Production experience with FastAPI or similar Python web frameworks.

Experience with asynchronous programming, testing, typing, profiling, debugging, and maintainable application design.

Proven experience owning backend architecture end to end, not only contributing to solutions designed by others.

Experience making and defending architectural decisions with Product, Engineering, and business stakeholde