Zeely Inc. - Backend Department Lead (Node.js)
Requirements
• 7+ years of commercial backend development experience with Node.js; • 3+ years in a technical leadership role such as Backend Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Lead; • Experience leading and developing backend engineers, including mentoring and performance management; • 3+ years of hands-on production experience with NestJS; • Strong system design skills and proven experience designing and evolving microservice and distributed architectures; • Experience building and scaling high-load production systems; • Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis, including performance optimization, data modeling, and caching strategies; • Experience with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle; • Hands-on experience with AWS, including EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, and OpenSearch; • Strong practical knowledge of Docker and containerized environments; • Strong understanding of reliability, observability, monitoring, incident management, and on-call practices; • Ability to balance architectural strategy with hands-on engineering and pragmatic delivery; • Upper-Intermediate English or higher. • Active AWS Solutions Architect or Developer certification; • Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools; • Experience optimizing infrastructure and architecture for cost, latency, and performance at scale; • Backend experience across both mobile applications and web products; • Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams in fast-growing product companies. • AI Expertise We Value: • Commercial experience integrating AI APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or other model providers; • Experience designing multi-model orchestration systems, including routing, fallbacks, retries, rate limits, and cost/latency optimization; • Understanding of production challenges around AI workloads, including reliability, observability, and provider dependencies; • Experience with AI-assisted engineering and code review tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar; • Understanding of RAG, embeddings, vector search, MCP, and AI agents; • Hands-on production experience is a strong plus.
Responsibilities
• Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and engineers' performance management • Define the architectural vision and ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform • Develop and evolve our AI orchestration layer across multiple models and providers, optimizing generation quality, latency, and cost efficiency • Own the evolution of the AI Gateway — the core platform component powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation • Scale infrastructure and backend services to support product growth and increasing workloads • Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and operational excellence • Deliver strategic AI initiatives, including our proprietary RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities • Collaborate closely with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve business goals • Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure capacity planning and cost optimization • 3+ years of hands-on experience with NestJS • Proven experience designing and evolving microservice architectures in production environments • Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis • Experience working with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle • Hands-on experience with AWS services, including EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, and OpenSearch • Strong Docker expertise • Experience designing reliable, scalable, and observable distributed systems • Solid understanding of on-call processes and incident management practices • Upper-Intermediate English level or higher
Benefits
• Work with cutting-edge technologies and contribute to building AI-powered tools • Join a strong A-level team that motivates you to grow and achieve more • Remote-first approach: work from anywhere, with the option to visit our offices in Warsaw and Kyiv • Paid day offs and sick leaves — we care about your work-life balance • Regular performance reviews to ensure your growth is transparent and rewarded • Financial support — consultations for private entrepreneurs from our dedicated finance team • Recruitment process: • Intro Call → Test Task → Technical Interview → Final Interview → Reference Check → Offer • Send us your CV — we'd love to get to know you!
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