Backend Lead

About the Role:

We are seeking a Backend Lead who is passionate about building reliable, secure and scalable platforms that power web and mobile experiences. You will lead the backend engineering efforts across our product surface area — from public APIs and internal services to developer-facing tools and integrations. This role blends technical leadership and people leadership: you will supervise a small team of two backend engineers while remaining hands-on in architecture, implementation and delivery. You will collaborate closely with Product, your manager and other engineering leads/ICs and occasionally Design to deliver high-quality, maintainable systems that accelerate our roadmap.

Reports to VP, Engineering
Location: US
Location Type: NYC / Remote

What you'll do:

• Lead the end-to-end backend design, implementation and delivery across APIs, services and developer tools.
• Own architecture, reliability, performance, security and scalability for backend systems; collaborate with the Platform team on observability and infrastructure.
• Supervise and support a team of two backend engineers: set clear goals, facilitate execution, provide coaching and feedback and cultivate a healthy engineering culture — with room to take on broader people-lead scope over time.
• Partner with Product, mobile/SDK, web and Platform teams to scope projects, sequence work and align milestones across teams.
• Design and drive the backend REST API for our core products (mobile app and mobile SDK), ensuring interfaces are consistent, well-documented and ergonomic for mobile, web and third‑party clients.
• Build and maintain internal systems and services (e.g., data processing, job/queue execution, admin and back-office tools).
• Plan and deliver integrations with third-party seller platforms (such as Shopify) and help shape language-specific API clients in major languages (e.g., TypeScript, Python, Go).
• Own our customer-facing API and docs site, continuously improving developer experience, documentation quality and onboarding.
• Serve as a technical point of contact with customers and partners for API/integration projects, including technical discovery, integration guidance, and escalation.
• Establish and evolve engineering standards, including code review practices, testing strategy, CI/CD workflows and release processes, with clear test coverage expectations.
• Share and adopt best practices in AI development tooling and workflows (e.g., prompt engineering, evaluation, retrieval, orchestration), collaborating with teams across the org and continuously learning to raise the bar.
• Mentor junior engineers through pairing, design feedback and career-supportive guidance.
• Uphold security, privacy and compliance best practices; partner with the broader tech org on SOC 2 and GDPR initiatives; ensure high-quality releases with automation and comprehensive testing

What you bring:

• 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience, including 2+ years in a lead and/or people-lead capacity.
• Strong track record designing, building and operating production APIs and services that are secure, observable and scalable.
• Proficiency in Python (e.g., FastAPI, Django, Flask) and AWS; hands-on with Postgres, Redis, S3 and DynamoDB.
• Experience partnering with client teams (mobile, web or third‑party developers) to deliver APIs/SDKs and integrations.
• Comfort engaging with customers and partners as a technical point of contact for API/integration work.
• Expertise in system design, API design and data modeling; a holistic client perspective when designing APIs (e.g., mobile-first flows, request patterns and payload shapes that fit how clients consume and cache data).
• Experience leading code reviews, setting engineering standards and mentoring engineers across levels.
• Familiarity with CI/CD, automated testing and modern observability (e.g., OpenTelemetry); comfortable collaborating with a Platform team that manages the tooling.
• Strong cross-functional communication; ability to influence and align stakeholders and drive clarity.
• Proven ability to balance strategic thinking with hands-on execution.

Nice to have:

• Experience with SDKs and mobile-backend patterns supporting iOS/Android clients.
• Background building developer platforms: docs sites, API references, SDKs/clients or developer portals.
• Experience building integrations with e-commerce/marketplace seller platforms.
• Exposure to AI/ML or data-intensive/streaming systems.
• Experience with global/multi-market or multi-region products.
• TypeScript experience; helpful for collaborating on developer tools and services.

The starting salary for this role is competitive and will depend on skills and experience. We have competitive pay bands for all other countries based on market standards. Individual compensation decisions are based on several factors, including experience level, skill set and balancing internal equity relative to peers at the company. Based on these factors, we expect most of the candidates offered roles at our company to fall healthily throughout the range. We recognize that the person we hire may be less experienced (or more senior) than this job description, as posted. If so, the updated salary range will be communicated to you as a candidate.