Key Responsibilities
- Lead and mentor a team of talented engineers building high-performance APIs and microservices
- Partner with Product Managers to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions
- Drive architectural decisions for distributed systems handling real-time financial data flows
- Champion best practices for API design, database optimization, and service reliability
- Foster a culture of continuous improvement, code quality, and technical excellence
- Collaborate with cross-functional teams to ensure seamless integration between services
- Balance hands-on technical contribution with people management and strategic planning
- Guide the team through technical challenges while maintaining project velocity and quality
- Establish monitoring, alerting, and performance benchmarks for mission-critical services
- Build strong relationships across engineering teams to promote knowledge sharing
Required Qualifications and Key Competencies
- Must Have Skills:
- 7+ years of software engineering experience with at least 2 years in a leadership role
- Deep expertise in building and scaling API-driven architectures and microservices
- Strong background in database design and optimization (SQL and NoSQL)
- Hands-on experience with real-time data streaming and event-driven architectures
- Proven track record of leading teams delivering complex backend systems
- Excellence in technical communication – able to explain complex concepts simply
- Experience with distributed systems patterns and their trade-offs
- Natural ability to mentor engineers and help them grow their careers
- Comfortable making architectural decisions that balance innovation with stability
- Strong project management skills with experience in agile methodologies
Technical Skills
- Proficiency in designing RESTful and/or GraphQL APIs
- Experience with microservices orchestration and service mesh technologies
- Understanding of database technologies (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, etc.)
- Knowledge of message queuing and streaming platforms (Kafka, RabbitMQ, etc.)
- Familiarity with containerization and cloud-native development
- Experience with monitoring and observability tools
Preferred Skills
- Preferred Skills (great if you have experience with):
- Node.js or C#/.NET development – hands-on experience with our client’s stack
- Financial services or high-frequency trading systems
- WebSocket implementations and real-time bidirectional communication
- Event sourcing and CQRS patterns
- Kubernetes and container orchestration at scale
- Performance tuning for low-latency systems
- Building teams from scratch or scaling existing teams
- CI/CD pipeline design and DevOps practices
- Data pipeline architecture and ETL processes
- Chaos engineering and resilience testing
- Leading remote or distributed engineering teams