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 ownership mindset, including monitoring, alerting, debugging, incident investigation, and reliability improvements. * Experience with cloud infrastructure, containerised applications, deployment tooling, and CI/CD. * Ability to reason about deployment safety, rollbacks, scalability, resource limits, and system capacity. * Proven experience improving an engineering process, technical area, or system from an unclear or immature state to a measurable target state. * Ability to balance product delivery speed with architecture quality and long-term maintainability. * Experience leading experienced engineers without micromanagement. * Experience with delegation, performance feedback, team development, and technical ownership distribution. * Strong ownership, initiative, structured communication, and ability to make decisions under uncertainty. AI-First Engineering Experience: We are looking for more than occasional chatbot usage or basic code generation. A strong candidate should be able to provide concrete examples of using AI in an end-to-end software delivery workflow, such as: * Spec-driven or context-driven development. * AI coding agents. * Automated code review. * Test and documentation generation. * Reusable repository or company-level AI context. * Agentic pipelines and workflow automation. * AI-assisted debugging and incident investigation. * Evaluations and quality gates. * Security and data privacy controls. * Measuring the impact of AI adoption on delivery speed and quality. * Introducing AI workflows across an engineering team. Nice to Have: * Experience building multi-product, multi-tenant, or platform-based architectures. * Experience creating internal frameworks, service templates, or reusable backend components. * Experience scaling products without proportional growth of the engineering team. * Experience with AWS, including S3, Lambda, ECS, EKS, or related services. * Experience with Redis. * Hands-on Kubernetes experience. * Strong Docker experience. * Experience with GitHub Actions or similar CI/CD tooling. * Experience with Temporal or another workflow orchestration platform. * Experience applying DDD, CQRS, event sourcing, or similar architectural patterns pragmatically. * Experience with B2C, EdTech, subscriptions, payments, analytics, or mobile-first products * Experience working in an early-stage or fast-changing product environment. Good Fit for This Role: This role is a good fit for someone who: *  Remains a strong hands-on backend engineer. * Enjoys combining coding, architecture, and leadership. * Can independently assess the current technical state and define a better target state. * Creates engineering processes rather than only following existing ones. * Takes ownership of services after they are released to production. * Can make pragmatic architectural decisions without unnecessary complexity. * Thinks about product and business outcomes, not only implementation. * Can set a technical standard for experienced engineers. * Is comfortable challenging existing decisions and defending a well-reasoned position. * Sees AI as a way to redesign engineering workflows, not only generate code. * Is ready to lead both technology and people. Why You’ll Love Working With Us: * Innovative environment: We are building and scaling EdTech products while actively experimenting with new technologies and development approaches. * Global remote work: Work with an international team from anywhere within a compatible time zone. * Health support: Company-provided medical expense compensation. * AI tools: Company-provided AI subscriptions and other engineering tools. * Flexible time off: 21 days of annual leave plus 10 bank holidays. * Collaborative culture: Work alongside experienced and motivated professionals who value ownership, speed, and measurable results. * Real influence: Help define the backend strategy, engineering standards, and AI-first development practices of a growing product ecosystem. Interview Process: 1. HR interview 2. Technical Interview 3. Leadership Interview 4. Final interview