Torchora
Back to Home

Key Responsibilities and Required Skills for Backend Technical Lead

💰 $ - $

EngineeringBackendLeadershipCloud

🎯 Role Definition

We are seeking an experienced Backend Technical Lead to own the architecture, development, and delivery of mission-critical backend systems. This hands-on leadership role combines deep technical expertise in distributed systems, microservices and cloud-native infrastructure with strong people and program management skills. The Backend Technical Lead will partner with product, QA, DevOps and security teams to design scalable, reliable, and maintainable services that meet business objectives and SLAs. Ideal candidates bring pragmatic system design, API-first thinking, and proven experience operating services at scale in AWS/GCP/Azure and Kubernetes environments.

📈 Career Progression

Typical Career Path

Entry Point From:

  • Senior Backend Engineer with team lead responsibilities
  • Tech Lead / Staff Engineer focusing on backend services
  • Principal Software Engineer with distributed systems experience

Advancement To:

  • Engineering Manager (Backend / Platform)
  • Senior Staff Engineer / Principal Architect
  • Director of Engineering — Backend / Platform

Lateral Moves:

  • Platform or Infrastructure Lead
  • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) Lead
  • API/Integration Architect

Core Responsibilities

Primary Functions

  • Lead the end-to-end design, architecture and implementation of scalable backend services and APIs, ensuring high availability, low latency and operational excellence for customer-facing and internal systems.
  • Define and own the technical roadmap and backlog for backend systems; translate product requirements into architecture decisions, service boundaries, and release plans that align with business goals.
  • Design and implement microservices and distributed systems patterns (event-driven architecture, CQRS, domain-driven design) that enable independent deployability and fault isolation.
  • Partner with product managers and stakeholders to prioritize technical debt, trade-offs, and feature delivery, balancing speed-to-market with long-term maintainability and scalability.
  • Establish and enforce coding standards, architecture principles, and best practices for backend development, including API design, error handling, observability, and secure defaults.
  • Mentor, coach, and grow a team of backend engineers by providing technical guidance, design reviews, performance feedback, and career development plans.
  • Drive code quality through peer reviews, automated testing strategies (unit, integration, contract tests), and test-driven development where appropriate.
  • Own and improve CI/CD pipelines, build/release automation, feature flags, and deployment strategies (blue/green, canary releases) to minimize risk and accelerate delivery.
  • Define SLOs and SLIs for backend services, monitor system health, set alerting thresholds, and lead post-incident reviews to identify root causes and remediation.
  • Design database schemas and data models for high throughput and consistency requirements; lead decisions on SQL vs NoSQL, caching strategies, and read/write scaling.
  • Implement robust security controls and collaborate with security teams to perform threat modeling, code scanning, secret management, and secure-by-design practices.
  • Optimize system performance by analyzing production telemetry, profiling hotspots, and implementing caching layers, connection pooling, and efficient data access patterns.
  • Drive service observability by instrumenting distributed tracing, metrics, and structured logging to enable rapid debugging and performance tuning.
  • Evaluate, select, and pilot new backend technologies, frameworks, and cloud services to improve development velocity and system reliability.
  • Coordinate cross-functional technical initiatives (data migrations, platform upgrades, compliance projects) and communicate trade-offs and timelines to stakeholders.
  • Lead technical onboarding for new hires and contribute to internal knowledge base, architecture decision records (ADRs), runbooks, and documentation.
  • Collaborate with DevOps/SRE to manage capacity planning, autoscaling policies, and cost optimization across cloud environments to meet SLAs and budget goals.
  • Drive API versioning strategies, backward compatibility, and migration plans to ensure stable partner and customer integrations.
  • Facilitate architecture and design reviews, ensuring solutions are robust, maintainable, and aligned with company-wide architecture principles.
  • Participate in recruiting by evaluating candidates, conducting interviews, and contributing to hiring decisions for backend and platform roles.
  • Champion reliability engineering practices including chaos engineering experiments, fault injection, and resilience testing to validate system behavior under failure.

Secondary Functions

  • Support ad-hoc data requests and exploratory data analysis.
  • Contribute to the organization's data strategy and roadmap.
  • Collaborate with business units to translate data needs into engineering requirements.
  • Participate in sprint planning and agile ceremonies within the data engineering team.
  • Assist product teams with performance benchmarking and scalability planning for upcoming features.
  • Help maintain and curate internal libraries, SDKs and templates to accelerate backend development across teams.
  • Provide technical input for vendor evaluations, contract negotiations, and third-party integrations.

Required Skills & Competencies

Hard Skills (Technical)

  • Strong proficiency in modern backend languages and frameworks such as Java / Kotlin (Spring Boot), Node.js (Express/Nest), Python (Django/Flask/FastAPI), or Go; ability to write idiomatic, testable, and maintainable code.
  • Deep experience designing and operating microservices architectures, service meshes, and API gateways; familiarity with RESTful APIs and gRPC.
  • Proven expertise with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and cloud-native services: EC2/EKS/ALB, Cloud Run, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, IAM, S3, CloudWatch/Stackdriver.
  • Containerization and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes (EKS/GKE/AKS), Helm, and Helm chart management.
  • Data storage and retrieval: relational databases (PostgreSQL/MySQL), NoSQL (MongoDB/Cassandra/Redis) and experience with sharding, indexing and query optimization.
  • Infrastructure as Code and automation: Terraform, CloudFormation, Pulumi, Ansible, CI/CD tools (Jenkins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI).
  • Observability tooling: Prometheus, Grafana, Zipkin/OpenTelemetry, Jaeger, ELK/EFK stack, and experience defining SLIs/SLOs.
  • Performance engineering: profiling, load testing (JMeter, k6, Gatling), caching strategies (Redis, CDN), and connection/IO optimizations.
  • Security and compliance: OAuth2/OpenID Connect, JWT, encryption at rest/in transit, secrets management (HashiCorp Vault), and vulnerability scanning.
  • Event streaming and messaging: Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub; designing at-least-once vs exactly-once semantics and idempotency patterns.
  • System design and scalability: capacity planning, horizontal scaling, eventual consistency, and architectural trade-offs for high throughput systems.
  • Testing strategies: unit, integration, contract tests, test harnesses, and mocking for scalable microservice testing.
  • Familiarity with Agile methodologies, sprint planning, and using project tracking tools like Jira or Linear.

Soft Skills

  • Strategic technical leadership with the ability to influence architecture decisions and align engineering efforts to company objectives.
  • Strong communication skills: articulate complex technical concepts to engineers, product managers, and executives.
  • Mentoring and coaching: develop engineers through feedback, pair programming, and technical growth plans.
  • Problem-solving and analytical thinking: diagnose outages and performance regressions under pressure.
  • Collaboration and stakeholder management: negotiate priorities, set expectations, and drive cross-team initiatives to completion.
  • Ownership and accountability: drive features from design through production and own their operational health.
  • Time management and prioritization: balance multiple projects, technical debt, and stakeholder requests.
  • Empathy and team building: foster an inclusive and high-performing engineering culture.
  • Decision-making under uncertainty: choose pragmatic solutions and iterate quickly when necessary.
  • Continuous learning mindset: keep current with backend trends, cloud evolutions, and performance practices.

Education & Experience

Educational Background

Minimum Education:

  • Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Electrical Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

Preferred Education:

  • Master's degree in Computer Science or related discipline or advanced certifications in cloud technologies (AWS Certified Solutions Architect, GCP Professional Cloud Architect, Certified Kubernetes Administrator).

Relevant Fields of Study:

  • Computer Science
  • Software Engineering
  • Information Systems
  • Distributed Systems / Cloud Computing

Experience Requirements

Typical Experience Range:

  • 6+ years of software engineering experience with 3+ years in backend-focused roles and at least 1-3 years in a technical lead or senior individual contributor role.

Preferred:

  • 8+ years experience building and operating large-scale backend systems, proven track record leading engineering teams, and direct experience deploying services on AWS/GCP/Azure and Kubernetes in production.
Explore More Careers