Lead Backend Engineer — Scale & Architecture for Mods

Nexus Mods; Exeter; On-site; GBP 80,000 - 90,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

4-day work week (32 hours)

£25 monthly games allowance

Employee Assistance Programme

Private BUPA healthcare

Flexible training budget

Regular social events

Job summary

Nexus Mods is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead a cross-functional pod and shape core services for millions of users. You will drive technical decisions, mentor engineers, and ensure delivery is robust, scalable, and aligned with our technical direction.

The role focuses on building high-scale backend systems, APIs (REST/GraphQL), and distributed architectures for a global modding community, across web and desktop platforms.

Qualifications

• Extensive backend engineering experience.
• Deep experience with one or more backend languages (Ruby, PHP, Java, Go, Node.js).
• Strong system design and architecture skills.
• Experience building and scaling APIs (REST and/or GraphQL).
• Distributed systems and event-driven architectures understanding.
• Relational databases (Postgres/MySQL) and NoSQL (Redis/ElasticSearch).
• Experience with CI/CD, Docker, and Kubernetes.
• Strong communication and leadership by influence.

Responsibilities

• Own technical direction within your pod (architecture, design, tooling, trade-offs).
• Build and scale backend services and APIs serving millions of users.
• Ensure systems are performant, reliable, and maintainable.
• Align pod decisions with wider platform architecture.
• Support and unblock engineers to help teammates work efficiently.
• Collaborate closely with Product, Design, and other disciplines.
• Drive engineering standards across code quality, testing, and delivery.
• Contribute to discovery, prototyping, and iterative delivery.
• Identify and tackle technical debt and scalability challenges.

Skills

Ruby

PHP

Java

Go

Node.js

Distributed systems

REST/GraphQL APIs

CI/CD

Docker

Kubernetes

Postgres/MySQL

Redis/ElasticSearch

System design

Leadership

Communication

Tools

Docker

Kubernetes

Redis

ElasticSearch

Job description

Nexus Mods is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to lead a cross-functional pod and shape core services for millions of users. You will drive technical decisions, mentor engineers, and ensure delivery is robust, scalable, and aligned with our technical direction.

The role focuses on building high-scale backend systems, APIs (REST/GraphQL), and distributed architectures for a global modding community, across web and desktop platforms.