Lead Backend AI Product Engineer

YGO.ai is a VC-funded AI tourism platform. 
This is a hands-on senior backend role for someone who uses AI to ship fast and cares about the product, not just the code.

This is not a traditional coding role. 
You'll use Claude Code and other AI tools to multiply your output, always thinking about how the feature you're building helps the user. 
We have no QA team, so you own the quality of what you ship: everything you deliver has to work.
 

What you'll do

• Own features end to end, from spec to deployment to fixing bugs
• Use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, then review the output for quality and architectural fit
• Fix bugs to learn the codebase, then build new features quickly
• Make fast decisions on what to build, buy or generate with AI
• Talk to customers when they report issues and ship fixes the same day
   

At Lead level, on top of the above

• Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients
• Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives down, sequence them, surface blockers

• Represent your pod in product planning and bring a strong product point of view to scoping and trade-offs

   

This is not a people-management role. 
No one-to-ones, no performance reviews, no career coaching. 
The coordination work sits on top of your engineering, not instead of it and most of your week is still spent building.
 

Our stack
Go monorepo (no framework, 3+ services), PostgreSQL, Redis, Docker Compose mirroring production, Jaeger tracing, BetterStack for logging and alerting, Redis Asynq queue. 

Claude Code is mandatory.

You must have

• An ownership mentality and a strive for simple, high-quality solutions
• Strong Golang experience: you'll review AI-generated Go and must understand how it works
• Proven experience using Claude Code, with specific examples
• A product mindset: you care why we're building something
• Excellent spoken English and a good connection for daily video calls
• Availability full-time, in European or African time zones (±3 hours from CET)
• Willingness to do occasional on-call
   

Required at Lead level

• Multi-year experience leading a pod, squad or similar unit (a hard must)
• Comfort facilitating a pod without formal authority
• Willingness to be the external face of your pod in client meetings

Don't apply if

• You've never used Claude Code or similar AI coding tools
• You're a perfectionist who loves to code for its own sake
• You need detailed specs before starting
• You see AI as a threat rather than leverage
• You're outside European or African time zones
• You want a people-management role or to lead in name only without being hands-on