Lead Back-End Engineer

We are looking for a Lead Back-end Engineer who can take full ownership of one of our products and its team. If you enjoy diving into existing product, writing code, growing and leading a team, and making technical decisions that directly impact product stability and business growth, this quest is for you 🚀

💪 YOUR QUEST-LINE:

• Own the backend of one of the company products end-to-end: architecture, reliability, and delivery of complex and high-impact features;
• Build and lead a team of mid/senior back-end engineers: hiring, onboarding, conducting performance reviews;
• Hand-on development (approx. 70% initially, gradually shifting towards management as team grows);
• Drive architectural discussions and implementation planning;
• Establish, maintain and improve back-end engineering standards;
• Contribute to reducing technical debt and improving development processes;
• Collaborate closely with product managers, frontend developers, DevOps, and other backend engineers;
• Support building a healthy feedback culture.
   

👨‍🚀 YOUR IN-GAME SKIN:

• 5+ years of back-end experience, 1–3 of them in a Team/Tech Lead role;
• Experience in hiring engineers and growing a team from small size (1-2 devs) to a medium size squad;
• Experience with PHP (8.1+) and Laravel (9.0+): console commands, jobs, horizon, writing APIs;
• Experience with MySQL/MariaDB (complex queries, optimization, database design, indexes and optimizations); query profiling should be easy;
• Redis (or other caching, queues and event bus), understanding of process synchronization and atomic locks;
• Understanding of high-load systems, including scalability, fault tolerance, and performance considerations;
• Experience with asynchronous processing: queues and background jobs, schedulers, and event-driven patterns (Laravel Queues/Horizon or similar);
• API design & governance: REST/JSON, OpenAPI, versioning, error taxonomies, pagination, rate limiting; auth (JWT/OAuth);
• CI/CD (GitHub/GitLab), Docker; good grasp of cloud basics (AWS preferred) and observability (Sentry, Prometheus/Grafana/ELK);
• Knowledge of Software Development and Architectural patterns;
• Ability to design architecture from scratch and scale it with the team;
• You care about performance, stability, and scalability;
• Familiar with writing framework-level code, even if not part of your daily work;
• Comfortable setting up processes and aligning the team around them;
• Clear communicator who gives honest, helpful feedback;
• Prioritization of bringing Product value over Engineering perfection.
   

🚀 WILL BE YOUR BOOST:

• Experience with microservices architecture;
• Experience in building modular/service-oriented applications;
• Experience in working with Kubernetes, AWS;
• You know how to balance delivery speed with technical debt;
• Experienced in cross-functional collaboration: engineering, product, design, and analytics;
• Experience in defining SLAs/SLOs and setting up production monitoring/alerting;
• Flexible leadership style, depending on team context;
• Familiar with performance and observability metrics.
   

🥷 YOUR POWER-UPS SOURCE:

• Spontaneous weekend from the CEO;
• Support for professional development, including events (we went on a MAJOR trip to Copenhagen, for example), certifications, and educational materials;
• Start working at a time that’s comfortable for you;
• People Partner who will always support you in word and deed;
• Anniversary and performance bonuses;
• Input on project direction in a bureaucracy-free environment;
• Regular performance reviews and personal feedback sessions;
• 20 paid vacation days and 7 sick leave days;
• Assisting with the accounting and tax management for individual entrepreneurs;
• English language and Well-being benefit — so that you can improve your mental health the way you want;
• No time tracking;
• We purchase CHARGING STATIONS for our spacers;
• We help Ukraine: every month the company supports AFU and transfers donations for ammunition and supplies.
   

If you read everything carefully and exclaimed: «Oh, yeah, I'm good at everything and I want to do cool things together!», then we are already looking forward to your resume and portfolio! 

Send them as soon as possible! 🚀