Backend Lead: AI Platform, Scalable & Remote

Zeely Inc.; United States; Remote; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first

Paid day offs

Sick leaves

Performance reviews

Finance consultations

Job summary

Zeely AI is seeking a Backend Lead to own and scale our AI-powered backend platform in a remote-first environment. You will steer architecture, drive team growth, and oversee critical services powering a fast-growing US-market product used by millions.

You will lead with hands-on expertise in Node.js, NestJS, microservices, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS, while mentoring engineers and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact AI capabilities.

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 experience designing microservice architectures in production.
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis.
• Experience with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle.
• Hands-on experience with AWS services (EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, OpenSearch).
• Strong Docker expertise.
• Experience designing reliable, scalable distributed systems.
• 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 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 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

Team leadership

NestJS

Microservices

PostgreSQL

Redis

ORMs: Prisma/Drizzle

AWS services

Docker

On-call & incident mgmt

English (Upper-Int)

Tools

Kubernetes

Terraform

GCP

Cloudflare

Job description

Zeely AI is seeking a Backend Lead to own and scale our AI-powered backend platform in a remote-first environment. You will steer architecture, drive team growth, and oversee critical services powering a fast-growing US-market product used by millions.

You will lead with hands-on expertise in Node.js, NestJS, microservices, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS, while mentoring engineers and collaborating with cross-functional teams to deliver high-impact AI capabilities.