Tech Lead Backend / Platform Engineering

About the Role We're seeking a Tech Lead to drive technical direction for a core engineering team. You'll balance hands-on coding with architectural ownership, guiding a team of engineers while ensuring systems are scalable, reliable, and well-designed. Responsibilities Own high-level design (HLD) and low-level design (LLD) for services and systems within your team's scope Lead design and architecture discussions for new microservices and platform capabilities Drive technical decisions around Kafka-based event streaming, data storage (MongoDB, PostgreSQL), and service architecture Guide the team on AWS infrastructure choices and cloud-native best practices Establish and enforce engineering standards: code quality, testing, CI/CD practices (Git, Gradle pipelines) Review designs and code from team members; provide technical mentorship Collaborate with product managers and cross-functional stakeholders to translate requirements into technical plans Identify and resolve architectural bottlenecks, technical debt, and scalability risks Balance individual contribution (coding) with team leadership and unblocking Requirements 7–10 years of software engineering experience, with 1–2+ years in a technical leadership capacity Expert-level proficiency in Java and Kotlin Deep experience with Spring Boot, microservices, and distributed systems design Strong hands-on experience with Kafka for event-driven architectures Proven experience with MongoDB and PostgreSQL at scale Strong AWS expertise (compute, storage, networking, managed services) Demonstrated ability to own HLD and LLD for complex systems Experience setting up robust CI/CD pipelines (Git, Gradle) Strong leadership, mentorship, and stakeholder communication skills Track record of leading a team through delivery of complex technical projects