Backend Lead – JD

Job Description

Employment Type: Full-time
Work Model: Remote
Location: Bucharest, Romania

Role Overview

The Backend Lead owns backend architecture across APIs, feeds, and real-time systems. This role is responsible for defining technical standards, governing contracts, and ensuring reliability, security, and scalability across the backend platform.

This is a hands-on leadership role that combines architectural ownership with mentorship and technical governance.

Responsibilities

• Own backend architecture across NestJS-based APIs and Hono-based feed and chat services, with clear service boundaries and migration strategies
• Define and enforce OpenAPI-first development, including API contracts, versioning, and deprecation policies
• Lead backend security architecture, including JWT handling, role design, and rate-limiting strategies
• Set MongoDB schema and indexing standards and review aggregation usage for performance and correctness
• Own distributed system reliability, including queue patterns, retries, idempotency, and dead-letter queue strategies
• Define and maintain observability standards, including SLOs, dashboards, runbooks, and incident response processes
• Establish and enforce backend engineering quality standards, including code reviews and architectural guidelines
• Mentor and guide backend engineers while maintaining delivery velocity and production stability

Required Skills and Experience

Backend Architecture and Platforms

• Proven ownership of backend platforms operating at scale
• Deep hands-on expertise with TypeScript and NestJS
• Experience designing and evolving service-oriented or microservice architectures
• Strong understanding of real-time systems, feeds, and API-driven platforms

API Governance and Contracts

• Strong experience with OpenAPI-first API design
• Ownership of API versioning, backward compatibility, and deprecation strategies
• Experience governing contracts across multiple backend services

Security and Reliability

• Strong understanding of authentication and authorization systems, including JWT and role-based access control
• Experience defining rate-limiting and abuse-prevention strategies
• Practical experience operating backend systems in security-sensitive or high-risk environments

Data and Distributed Systems

• Strong MongoDB experience, including schema design, indexing strategies, and aggregation review
• Hands-on experience with distributed systems under load, including queues, retries, idempotency, and failure handling

Leadership and Ownership

• Demonstrated ability to set standards and drive alignment across backend teams
• Experience mentoring engineers and reviewing architectural decisions
• Strong ownership mindset focused on reliability, scalability, and long-term maintainability