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Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Lead Back End Engineer

💰 $160,000 - $220,000 USD per year

Software EngineeringBackend DevelopmentTechnology LeadershipSystem Architecture

🎯 Role Definition

The Lead Back End Engineer is a senior-level technical leader responsible for guiding a team of engineers in the design, development, and maintenance of the server-side logic, databases, and APIs that power our applications. This role is a hybrid of hands-on-keyboard contribution and strategic technical oversight. At its heart, the Lead Back End Engineer acts as the architectural conscience for their team, ensuring that solutions are not only effective in the short term but are also scalable, reliable, and maintainable in the long run. They are the primary mentor for other engineers on the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement. This individual translates complex business requirements into robust technical designs and sets the standard for code quality and development practices within their domain.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Back End Engineer
  • Staff Software Engineer (at a smaller organization or on a different team)
  • Senior Solutions Architect (with strong coding background)

Advancement To:

  • Principal Engineer
  • Engineering Manager
  • Director, Solutions Architecture

Lateral Moves:

  • DevOps Lead / Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • Senior Solutions Architect
  • Data Engineering Lead

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Architectural Design and Strategy: Lead the design and architecture of highly scalable, resilient, and secure back-end systems and microservices, making key decisions that shape the technical direction of the product.
  • Technical Leadership and Mentorship: Provide technical guidance, mentorship, and coaching to a team of mid-level and junior back-end engineers, fostering their growth and improving the team's overall technical capability.
  • Hands-On Development: Actively contribute to the codebase by writing clean, efficient, and well-documented production-grade code for critical features and complex systems.
  • Code Quality and Best Practices: Champion and enforce engineering best practices, including comprehensive code reviews, unit and integration testing, and adherence to established coding standards.
    lime System Performance and Reliability: Take ownership of the operational health of back-end services, including monitoring, alerting, performance tuning, and leading incident response and post-mortems.
  • Technical Roadmap Definition: Collaborate with Product Managers and other stakeholders to define the technical roadmap, break down large initiatives into manageable components, and estimate development effort.
  • Cross-Functional Collaboration: Serve as the primary technical point of contact for your team, effectively collaborating with front-end, mobile, data science, and product teams to deliver cohesive solutions.
  • API Development and Management: Design, build, and maintain robust and intuitive RESTful or GraphQL APIs that are consumed by various internal and external clients.
  • Database Design and Optimization: Oversee the design, implementation, and maintenance of database schemas, and lead efforts in query optimization and data migration strategies.
  • CI/CD and Automation: Drive the improvement and automation of our continuous integration and deployment (CI/CD) pipelines to ensure rapid, reliable, and safe delivery of software.
  • Technology Evaluation and Adoption: Research, evaluate, and prototype new technologies, tools, and frameworks to identify opportunities for innovation and improvement in our tech stack.
  • Scalability Planning: Proactively identify and address potential performance bottlenecks and scalability issues before they impact users.
  • Security Oversight: Ensure all back-end services and applications are built with security best practices in mind, and collaborate with security teams to address vulnerabilities.
  • Technical Documentation: Create and maintain comprehensive technical documentation, including architectural diagrams, design documents, and API specifications.
  • Project Leadership: Lead the technical execution of complex, multi-sprint projects from inception to completion, ensuring the team stays on track and unblocked.
  • Decomposition of Complex Problems: Excel at breaking down large, ambiguous problems into smaller, well-defined tasks for the team to execute.
  • On-Call Rotation Leadership: Participate in and help lead the on-call rotation, acting as a point of escalation for complex production issues.
  • Interviewing and Hiring: Play a key role in the hiring process for the engineering team, including conducting technical interviews and evaluating candidates.
  • Stakeholder Communication: Clearly and concisely communicate complex technical concepts, decisions, and trade-offs to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
  • Legacy System Modernization: Develop and execute strategies for modernizing legacy systems, including refactoring, re-platforming, or incremental replacement.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's broader engineering strategy and technical guilds.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in and help facilitate sprint planning, retrospectives, and other agile ceremonies within the team.
  • Represent the team in cross-departmental technical forums and discussions.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Expert-Level Programming: Mastery of one or more server-side languages such as Go, Python (Django, Flask), Java (Spring), C#, or Node.js.
  • Cloud Infrastructure: Deep experience with a major cloud provider (AWS, GCP, Azure), including IaaS/PaaS services like EC2, S3, Lambda, Cloud SQL, and managed Kubernetes (EKS, GKE).
    unlime Database Systems: Proficiency with both relational (e.g., PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL (e.g., MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis, Cassandra) database technologies.
  • System Architecture: Proven ability to design and implement complex software architectures, including microservices, event-driven systems (using Kafka, RabbitMQ), and domain-driven design (DDD).
  • API Design: Strong knowledge of API design principles for both REST and GraphQL, including versioning, security, and performance.
  • Containerization & Orchestration: Hands-on experience with Docker for containerizing applications and Kubernetes for orchestration.
  • Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Proficiency with tools like Terraform or CloudFormation to manage and provision infrastructure programmatically.
  • CI/CD Tooling: Experience setting up and maintaining CI/CD pipelines using tools like Jenkins, GitLab CI, or GitHub Actions.
  • Observability: Expertise in implementing and utilizing monitoring, logging, and tracing tools (eg., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, New Relic).
  • Testing Frameworks: In-depth knowledge of unit, integration, and end-to-end testing methodologies and frameworks.

Soft Skills

  • Leadership & Influence: The ability to guide a team and influence technical decisions without direct managerial authority.
  • Mentorship: A passion for teaching and developing the skills of other engineers.
  • Strategic Thinking: The capacity to think beyond the immediate task and consider the long-term impact of technical choices.
  • Exceptional Communication: Capable of articulating complex technical ideas clearly to diverse audiences, including engineers, product managers, and executives.
  • Problem-Solving: A systematic, analytical approach to diagnosing and resolving complex technical and logical issues.
  • Ownership and Accountability: A strong sense of responsibility for the team's services and a proactive, "buck stops here" attitude.
  • Collaboration: A team-player mindset with a proven ability to work effectively in a collaborative, agile environment.
  • Pragmatism: The ability to balance technical purity with business needs and deadlines, making pragmatic trade-offs when necessary.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in a technical field or equivalent demonstrated practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master’s degree in Computer Science or a related technical field.

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Mathematics

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 8-12+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant focus on back-end development.

Preferred:

  • A minimum of 3 years in a technical leadership capacity (e.g., Tech Lead, Senior Engineer with lead responsibilities), demonstrating experience in leading projects and mentoring other engineers.
  • Proven track record of designing, building, and operating business-critical, large-scale distributed systems in a cloud environment.
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