Head of Backend Engineering

Muzz; London; On-site; GBP 70,000 - 110,000; Full time

Job summary

Join a dynamic and innovative consumer tech startup as the Head of Backend Engineering. In this pivotal role, you will lead a talented team of over 20 engineers, driving best practices and enhancing the backend stack to support rapid feature releases. Collaborate closely with the engineering leadership team to tackle cross-company initiatives and ensure the platform's performance and reliability. With a focus on mentoring and fostering excellence, you'll play a crucial role in shaping the future of the company's backend infrastructure. This is an exciting opportunity to make a significant impact in a fast-growing company that values diversity, creativity, and teamwork.

Benefits

Meaningful equity

Generous Holiday / PTO (33 days)

International travel twice a year

Team building activities

Qualifications

• 8+ years in backend engineering with strong leadership experience.
• Expertise in AWS and Go, with a focus on event-driven services.

Responsibilities

• Lead a team of 20+ backend and devops engineers to drive best practices.
• Own cross-company initiatives and ensure platform performance.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Team Leadership

Go Programming

AWS Services

Scripting (Shell/Python)

Terraform

Containerization

Networking

Database Management (RDS, DynamoDB)

Cost Estimation

Education

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or related field

Tools

AWS

Terraform

Docker

Job description

We’re looking for an experienced leader to join our engineering leadership team and take charge of all aspects of backend engineering. You’ll be leading a 20+ team of backend and devops engineers to drive best practices and work with our squads on delivering key company initiatives.

As the Head of Backend Engineering you will be responsible for the whole backend stack here at Muzz both the day to day smooth running and architecting/planning changes for new features.

You will join a 3 person engineering leadership team including the CTO and Head of Mobile Engineering to tackle cross company initiatives vital to the company’s success.

Responsibilities

• Lead a 20+ team of backend + devops engineers
• Drive best practices in our backend stack through the leads
• Work with our Platform Core squad on improving Developer experience to enable us to release features faster, reduce technical debt and increase developer satisfaction
• Work as part of a 3 person engineering leadership team to uncover issues across engineering, agree best practices and solve cross company engineering challenges.
• Help leads within the teams grow and push them to achieve excellence within their area
• Own cross-company initiatives and work with squads to prioritise and deliver
• Be responsible for the uptime and performant running of our entire platform
• Monitor our stack, profile code and optimise code where necessary to reduce resource requirements and cost to run
• Drive efficiency gains reducing the company cloud bill
• Help backend engineers across the company to architect changes to keep things lean and simple
• Stay up to date with new opportunities in the AWS space
• Work with our Data Engineering team to ensure the smooth flow of production data to our data warehouse setup
• Ensure our Incident management process is working well and that we’re learning and growing with every production incident
• Stay hands on writing and reviewing code where needed to help the team out

Must haves

• 8+ years in Backend engineering
• 5+ years leading engineering teams
• Extensive mentoring experience
• Experience of focusing on business outcome first to quickly make difficult decisions
• Startup experience
• Strong Go experience with focus on event driven services and gRPC
• Strong scripting skills (shell, or Python)
• Expertise with building on the cloud AWS services – we use over 40 AWS services
  • Knowledge across a wide range of compute options such as ECS, EKS and Lambda
  • IAM – Experience handling IAM resource permissions
  • Networking – fundamental understanding of VPC, subnet routing and gateways
  • Storage – strong understanding of S3, EBS and Parquet
  • Databases – RDS, DynamoDB
  • Experience doing cost estimation in Cost Explorer and planning efficiency changes
• Terraform and containerisation experience
• Understanding of a broad range of protocols like HTTP, TCP, gRPC, DNS etc

Nice to haves

• GCP experience
• Advanced EC2 knowledge like spot fleets
• Experience with Amazon Neptune and Athena
• Experience with Kinesis or Kafka
• Experience with payment providers like Stripe, Google Play, Apple App Store
• Previous experience in dating and/or social media space
• Worked in leadership in a fast scaling business

Why join Muzz?

We’re a profitable Consumer Tech startup, backed by Y Combinator (S17) and based in London. Join our fast growing team and work on an amazing product that’s changing the world.

A great product

We’re the leading app in this space with over 12 million members worldwide and counting!

A diverse team

We have people from all walks of life all adding their unique perspective. Muslims and non-Muslims, cat lovers and dog lovers. Everyone is welcome!

Meaningful equity

We’re all working together to succeed and everyone on the team gets a slice of the pie.

We value curiosity and building something wacky (but useful!). Every quarter we organise into random teams and together we build, code, and prototype. Prizes and dinner complete the day!

International travel

We fly the whole team to somewhere amazing twice a year to connect and have fun.

Mini golf, hikes, super competitive Catan nights - we’ve done it all. Maybe you’ll be at the next social?

Generous Holiday / PTO

All full-time members get at least 33 days of holiday, regardless of where they live.

Our hiring process

We pride ourselves on making fast hiring decisions.

Step 1.

Interview (in person or remote)

Step 5.

Receive an offer!

Join our team

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