Remote Backend Lead — Node.js for AI Platform Growth

zeely; United States; Remote; USD 160,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first approach

Paid day offs and sick leaves

Regular performance reviews

Financial support for private ENTREPRE

Job summary

Zeely AI is seeking a Backend Lead to own and scale the backend platform powering our AI gateway and orchestration. You will lead the Backend Department, drive architectural direction, and mentor engineers across a high-load environment.

You will shape the AI orchestration layer, ensure reliability, latency, and cost efficiency, and collaborate closely with frontend, mobile, QA, AI engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve ambitious product goals. Remote-first with strong engineering culture.

Qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial experience with Node.js.
• 3+ years in a Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager role with direct people management responsibilities.
• 3+ years with NestJS and microservice architectures in production environments.
• Proven expertise with PostgreSQL/Redis and ORMs such as Prisma/Drizzle.
• Hands-on AWS experience (EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, OpenSearch).
• Strong Docker expertise and observable distributed systems design.
• Excellent English (Upper-Intermediate) speaking and writing.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and engineers' performance management.
• Define architectural vision for reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform.
• Develop and evolve AI orchestration layer across models/providers, optimize generation quality, latency, and cost.
• Own evolution of the AI Gateway powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation.
• Scale infrastructure to support product growth and increasing workloads.
• Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and ops.
• Deliver strategic AI initiatives including RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agents.
• Collaborate with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Eng, and DevOps teams to hit business goals.
• Partner with Principal Engineer on capacity planning and cost optimization.

Skills

Node.js

Team Lead

NestJS

Microservices

PostgreSQL

Redis

Prisma/Drizzle

AWS

Docker

Distributed systems

On-call

English

Tools

OpenSearch

Job description

Zeely AI is seeking a Backend Lead to own and scale the backend platform powering our AI gateway and orchestration. You will lead the Backend Department, drive architectural direction, and mentor engineers across a high-load environment.

You will shape the AI orchestration layer, ensure reliability, latency, and cost efficiency, and collaborate closely with frontend, mobile, QA, AI engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve ambitious product goals. Remote-first with strong engineering culture.