Backend Lead - Node.js & AI Platform

Zeely Inc.; Poland; Remote; PLN 447,000 - 670,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Office visits

Paid day offs

Sick leaves

Performance reviews

Finance consultations

Job summary

Zeely Inc. is seeking a Backend Lead to own the backend platform for a rapidly growing AI product trusted by millions. You will guide architecture, scale, and team growth while shaping the AI gateway and orchestration layers across models and providers.

Lead the department to improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and drive strategic AI initiatives with a focus on on-call readiness and robust observability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial experience with Node.js.
• 3+ years in a Lead/Engineering Manager role with people management.
• 3+ years hands-on experience with NestJS.
• Proven microservice architecture design in production.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Experience with Prisma and Drizzle ORM.
• Hands-on AWS experience: EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, OpenSearch.
• Strong Docker expertise.
• Experience designing reliable distributed systems.
• On-call and incident management understanding.
• Upper-Intermediate English or higher.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and engineers' performance management
• Define the architectural vision and ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform
• Develop and evolve our AI orchestration layer across multiple models and providers, optimizing generation quality, latency, and cost efficiency
• Own the evolution of the AI Gateway — the core platform component powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation
• Scale infrastructure and backend services to support product growth and increasing workloads
• Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and operational excellence
• Deliver strategic AI initiatives, including our proprietary RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities
• Collaborate closely with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve business goals
• Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure capacity planning and cost optimization

Skills

Node.js

NestJS

Lead/EM role

Microservices

PostgreSQL

Redis

Prisma/Drizzle

AWS (EKS, RDS, SQS)

Docker

Distributed systems

On-call/Incident mgmt

English (Upper-Intermediate+)

Tools

OpenSearch

Job description

Zeely Inc. is seeking a Backend Lead to own the backend platform for a rapidly growing AI product trusted by millions. You will guide architecture, scale, and team growth while shaping the AI gateway and orchestration layers across models and providers.

Lead the department to improve reliability, performance, and cost efficiency, collaborate with cross-functional teams, and drive strategic AI initiatives with a focus on on-call readiness and robust observability.