Backend Team Lead

Acclaim AI; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 150,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote across Europe

21 vacation days + holidays + 5 sick

Private English lessons

AI tools subscriptions

Job summary

Acclaim AI is expanding its Backend Lead role for an AI-powered product built on modern LLM technologies. You will own the platform services domain, partnering closely with product and engineering to turn ambitious ideas into scalable, production-ready systems.

You will lead a small backend team, shaping architecture, driving delivery, and ensuring observability and reliability in a fast-moving environment.

Qualifications

• 6+ years of experience building and shipping production software.
• 3+ years hands-on asynchronous Python in production environments.
• 2+ years of engineering leadership experience, leading teams through execution while remaining deeply technical.
• Strong background designing and evolving complex distributed systems, platform-level infrastructure, or other high-scale backend architectures.
• Thrive in high-autonomy environments: define technical direction, break down ambiguous problems, prioritize work, and deliver results without detailed specifications or constant guidance.
• Product-minded engineering approach: end-to-end ownership of features from shaping solutions to identifying risks and driving delivery.
• Strong technical leadership: providing thoughtful feedback, setting a high technical bar, and maximizing team effectiveness.
• Practical experience building with LLMs and agentic AI frameworks with up-to-date AI ecosystem awareness.

Responsibilities

• Lead a small backend team, owning execution – decomposition, estimation and prioritization.
• Continuously assess team performance and growth and adjust team composition when needed – without disrupting delivery.
• Build and maintain integrations with third-party services.
• Develop our internal LLM agent framework, focusing on scalability, throughput, and parallel processing.
• Extend and refine platform architecture to meet evolving needs.
• Technically lead the backend/platform track: break down complex work into clear tasks and build processes around product goals.
• Adapt quickly as priorities shift, in short feedback loops, keeping the team aligned and driving work to completion.
• Work closely with other teams to align on architecture and ownership boundaries.

Skills

Async Python

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Product-minded engineering

Observability & reliability

LLMs & agentic AI

Team growth & performance

Tools

Python

Kubernetes

Kafka

PostgreSQL

gRPC/HTTP

ELK

Grafana

LangGraph

Job description

We're expanding the Backend Lead behind an AI-powered product built on modern LLM technologies. You will own the platform services domain, partnering closely with product and engineering to turn ambitious ideas into scalable, production-ready systems.

Requirements

• 6+ years of experience building and shipping production software.
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with asynchronous Python in production environments.
• 2+ years of engineering leadership experience, leading teams through execution while remaining deeply technical.
• Strong background designing and evolving complex distributed systems, platform-level infrastructure, or other high-scale backend architectures.
• Thrive in high-autonomy environments: able to define technical direction, break down ambiguous problems, prioritize work, and deliver results without detailed specifications or constant guidance.
• Product-minded engineering approach: take end-to-end ownership of features - from shaping technical solutions and planning execution to identifying risks early, coordinating with cross-functional teams, and driving successful delivery.
• Strong technical leadership skills: able to provide thoughtful feedback, setting a high technical bar, while making decisions that maximize team effectiveness.
• Practical experience building with LLMs and agentic AI frameworks (e.g. LangGraph or similar), combined with an up-to-date understanding of the rapidly evolving AI ecosystem and engineering best practices.
• Comfortable operating in fast-moving, high-ambiguity environments, where requirements evolve, priorities shift, and engineers are expected to shape solutions rather than simply implement predefined tasks.

Responsibilities

• Lead a small backend team, owning execution – decomposition, estimation and prioritization.
• Continuously assess team performance and growth and adjust team composition when needed – all without disrupting delivery.
• Build and maintain integrations with third-party services.
• Develop our internal LLM agent framework, with a focus on scalability, throughput, and parallel processing.
• Extend and refine platform architecture to meet the project’s evolving needs.
• Technically lead the backend/platform track: break down complex work into clear tasks and build processes around product goals.
• Adapt quickly as priorities shift – work in short feedback loops, keep the team aligned, and drive work through to completion.
• Work closely with other teams: align on architecture and integrations, understand ownership boundaries, and decide what your team owns versus what can be handed off.
• Ensure system observability and reliability through metrics, tracing, and monitoring.

Tech stack: Python 3.13, asyncio, Kubernetes, Kafka, PostgreSQL, HTTP/gRPC, ELK, Grafana.

What We Offer

• The team has built award-winning AI products for tech corporations: devices, voice assistants, products that are actually in the world.
• Cutting-edge tech stack: Speech Technologies, NLP, Generative AI (LLMs, diffusion models), voice-first agentic architecture with privacy-first and on-premises deployment.
• High engineering bar and real ownership: the team cares about what actually works in production, not what looks good in a demo, and you'll see the impact of your work directly.
• Fast career progression: a senior-heavy team and a high volume of real problems means you grow faster than you would anywhere else.
• Startup pace with enterprise stability: real clients, real revenue, no bureaucracy.
• Fully remote across Europe.
• 21 vacation days + public holidays + 5 sick days.
• Private English lessons via Preply.
• Company-paid subscriptions to top AI tools (ChatGPT, Claude, Cursor, and others).