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 stakeholders. • Experience building and operating scalable, high-load, or data-intensive production systems. • Strong understanding of service design, system boundaries, data flows, integrations, and distributed system trade-offs. • Strong experience with event-driven systems, asynchronous processing, and message brokers such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, SQS, or similar. • Good understanding of retries, idempotency, message ordering, delivery guarantees, dead-letter handling, and failure recovery. Strong database fundamentals, including: • Data modelling. • Transactions and isolation. • Indexing. • Locking and concurrency. • Query plans. • Performance diagnosis and optimisation. • Production experience with MongoDB and an understanding of its modelling, consistency, and scaling trade-offs. • Production experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL. • Experience designing APIs and integrating external platforms, third-party services, and payment or subscription systems. • Strong production own...