Head of Backend Engineering

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

Job summary

Join a dynamic and profitable Consumer Tech startup as the Head of Backend Engineering. You will lead a talented team of over 20 engineers, driving best practices and ensuring the smooth operation of the backend stack. This role involves collaborating with a small leadership team to tackle cross-company initiatives and mentor engineers to achieve excellence. With a focus on AWS services and a commitment to innovation, this is a unique opportunity to make a significant impact in a fast-growing environment. If you're passionate about technology and leadership, this position offers the chance to work on a product that's changing the world.

Benefits

Meaningful equity

Generous Holiday / PTO

International travel

Team-building events

Qualifications

• 8+ years in Backend engineering with strong Go experience.
• 5+ years leading engineering teams and mentoring experience.
• Startup experience with a focus on business outcomes.

Responsibilities

• Lead a 20+ team of backend and devops engineers.
• Drive best practices and improve developer experience.
• Own cross-company initiatives and ensure platform uptime.

Skills

Backend Engineering

Leadership

Go

AWS Services

Terraform

Scripting (Shell, Python)

Event-driven Services

Mentoring

Containerisation

Networking

Tools

ECS

EKS

Lambda

RDS

DynamoDB

S3

EBS

Parquet

IAM

Cost Explorer

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 on 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 focusing on business outcomes first to quickly make difficult decisions
• Startup experience
• Strong Go experience with a 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 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.

Step 2.

Interview (in person or remote)

Step 3.

Receive an offer!

Join our team

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