[Hiring] Backend Lead @Zeely Inc.

Role Description

Join us as a Backend Lead and drive the development of the backend platform behind one of the fastest-growing AI products in the US market. We are looking for a strong technical leader who combines deep expertise in high-load system architecture with hands-on experience in building and scaling engineering teams.

In this role, you will have true ownership of our AI Gateway, generative pipelines, and mission-critical backend services powering a product already trusted by more than 1.5 million users.

Your key 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

Qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial experience with Node.js
• 3+ years of experience in a Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager role with direct people management responsibilities
• 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

Requirements

• Active AWS Architect or Developer certification (nice to have)
• Experience with Terraform (nice to have)
• Experience building high-load systems and optimizing cost/latency trade-offs (nice to have)
• Payment systems integration experience (nice to have)
• Backend development experience for mobile applications (iOS/Android) and web products (nice to have)
• Experience with GCP and Cloudflare (nice to have)
• Experience hiring engineers and building processes in fast-scaling organizations (nice to have)

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!