Backend Lead Developer

About the Role

We are looking for a strong Backend Lead Developer to join our personalization engineering team for a large enterprise hospitality platform.

Our team owns core backend services that power personalized digital experiences across multiple internal and customer-facing systems. These services support recommendation, eligibility, workflow orchestration, API-driven experiences, and cloud-based platform capabilities used by other teams across the organization.

This is a hands-on technical leadership role. You will not be managing people directly, but you will be expected to lead technical decisions, own backend architecture, guide other engineers, and drive high-quality execution across complex backend systems.

We are looking for an engineer who takes ownership, develops a deep understanding of production systems, thinks beyond individual tasks, and focuses on delivering scalable, long-term technical solutions. The ideal candidate communicates effectively and can confidently navigate complex technical challenges.

What You'll Do

• Lead backend architecture and technical design for personalization platform services.
• Design and build cloud-native backend APIs using TypeScript, Node.js, AWS Lambda, and API Gateway.
• Work on complex serverless workflows using AWS Step Functions and related AWS services.
• Build and maintain services that support personalized experiences, eligibility rules, recommendations, and workflow-driven platform capabilities.
• Help migrate, modernize, and improve backend services in the cloud.
• Work with databases and search systems such as DynamoDB, DocumentDB/MongoDB-style databases, OpenSearch, or Elasticsearch.
• Define backend patterns, engineering standards, and reusable approaches for the team.
• Review designs and code with a focus on reliability, scalability, maintainability, and production readiness.
• Collaborate closely with frontend engineers, product managers, QA, and other engineering teams.
• Improve observability, debugging, reliability, and operational quality of backend services.
• Mentor engineers technically and help the team make better architectural decisions.

What We're Looking For

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with TypeScript and Node.js.
• Deep understanding of Node.js backend development, including async execution, event loop behavior, API performance, error handling, and production debugging.
• Strong experience building APIs using AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
• Strong experience with AWS serverless architecture.
• Experience with AWS Step Functions or similar workflow orchestration systems.
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform.
• Experience with Serverless Framework or similar deployment frameworks.
• Strong understanding of NoSQL databases, especially DynamoDB or similar systems.
• Good understanding of database design, indexing, query patterns, and performance tradeoffs.
• Experience with OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, DocumentDB, or MongoDB-style systems is a strong plus.
• Strong distributed systems fundamentals: retries, idempotency, partial failure, timeouts, consistency, scaling, and observability.
• Ability to explain complex technical concepts clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong ownership mindset with the ability to work independently and drive initiatives from concept through delivery.
• We value engineers who can operate effectively in evolving environments, proactively identify opportunities, and help shape technical direction while collaborating closely with stakeholders.

Must-Have Skills

• TypeScript
• Node.js
• AWS Lambda
• API Gateway for backend APIs
• AWS serverless services
• DynamoDB or similar NoSQL databases
• Step Functions or workflow orchestration experience
• Terraform
• Serverless Framework
• Distributed backend system design
• Production debugging and ownership

Nice-to-Have Skills

• OpenSearch or Elasticsearch
• DynamoDB, MongoDB-compatible databases (including DocumentDB)
• Recommendation systems or personalization platforms
• Event-driven architecture
• Large-scale enterprise platform experience
• Experience modernizing or migrating services to the cloud

What Success Looks Like

In this role, success means taking ownership of complex backend systems, developing a deep understanding of how they operate in production, and continuously improving their reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

You should be comfortable looking at an ambiguous problem, breaking it down, proposing a practical architecture, explaining the tradeoffs, and helping the team execute.

You should be the kind of engineer who notices gaps, raises risks early, improves patterns, and makes the system easier for everyone else to work with.

Strong Candidates Will likely have

• Built and owned production backend APIs in Node.js and TypeScript.
• Worked extensively with AWS Lambda and API Gateway.
• Designed or maintained serverless workflows.
• Debugged real production issues.
• Worked with NoSQL databases at a meaningful scale.
• Demonstrated strong ownership of backend systems.
• Led technical decisions or architecture for a team.
• Communicated clearly across engineering, product, QA, and frontend teams.

Please note that this position may be subject to location-based hiring restrictions depending on business, legal, or operational requirements.