Lead Backend Developer (Remote)

movableink; United States; Remote; USD 147,000 - 192,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Fully remote

Job summary

Movable Ink is seeking a remote Lead Software Engineer focused on backend platform and integrations. You will shape technical direction while contributing through hands-on coding and architectural work.

The role drives reliability and operational excellence for a critical enterprise personalization platform. Responsibilities include defining system architecture, mentoring engineers, and ensuring scalable integration services with strong observability.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend or platform systems.
• Strong proficiency in Python and adjacent languages.
• Experience designing and operating distributed services with production reliability patterns.
• Experience building scalable backend services in cloud environments, ideally on Google Cloud Platform.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to translate technical tradeoffs for stakeholders.

Responsibilities

• Define technical vision, system boundaries, and architecture for services owned by the team, focusing on integration-facing capabilities.
• Lead hands-on design, implementation, code review, debugging, and production support on high-impact work.
• Translate product goals into technical plans, milestones, and incremental delivery paths with management and product teams.
• Mentor engineers daily, unblock work, review designs and code, and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Ensure integration services operate reliably at scale with observability, metrics, traces, logs, and postmortems.
• Represent the team in cross-platform architecture discussions and align on shared patterns and interfaces.

Skills

Python

Distributed systems

Leadership

GCP

Observability

Production reliability

Communication

Job description

Role overview

This is a remote lead software engineering position focused on backend platform and integrations work. The role sits at the intersection of big-picture architecture and hands-on coding, shaping technical direction for a critical platform capability while staying close to implementation details. The systems supported here underwrite a large share of outbound messaging for an enterprise personalization product, making reliability and operational excellence central to the mission.

Responsibilities

• Define technical vision, system boundaries, and architecture for services owned by the team, with an emphasis on integration-facing capabilities.
• Lead by example through hands-on design, implementation, code review, debugging, and production support on high-impact work.
• Translate fuzzy product goals into clear technical plans, milestones, and incremental delivery paths in partnership with engineering management and product counterparts.
• Mentor engineers day to day, unblock work, review designs and code, and raise the technical bar across the team.
• Ensure integration services operate reliably at scale by applying observability, metrics, traces, logs, alerts, and postmortems to continuously improve quality.
• Represent the team in cross-platform architecture discussions, building alignment around shared technical patterns, dependencies, and integration interfaces.

Requirements

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience building and operating backend or platform systems in production, with strong proficiency in Python and adjacent languages.
• Significant experience designing and operating distributed services, including stateful services, asynchronous processing, and production reliability patterns.
• Hands-on technical leadership experience: serving as the go-to person for unblocking, reviewing, mentoring, and driving complex technical initiatives end to end.
• Familiarity building third-party integrations and handling retries, idempotency, backoffs, rate limiting, partial failures, and external monitoring.
• Experience building scalable backend services in cloud environments, ideally on Google Cloud Platform, with a strong operational excellence mindset.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with product, design, and business stakeholders.

Nice to have

• Experience collaborating in a product-minded platform organization that balances technical quality with delivery momentum.

Benefits and work setup

• Fully remote position.
• Base pay range of $147,300-$192,000/year, plus potential additional bonus, with a full range of medical, financial, and other benefits.