Remote Lead Backend Engineer — Architect & Mentor

Protagonist Management LLC; Chicago (IL); On-site; USD 150,000 - 210,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Stock options

Generous vacation & sick time

Company holidays

Parental leave

Health benefits

401K with employer contribution

Job summary

SITE Technologies is seeking a hands-on Lead Backend Software Engineer to lead and grow a small backend team while personally building and evolving SITE’s platform and related customer systems.

This is a player‑coach role: the Lead will directly manage 3 to 4 senior backend engineers, set technical direction, remain deeply involved in architecture, implementation, quality, and operation of critical backend systems, and oversee nearshore engineers or consultants as the team evolves.

Qualifications

• Hands-on experience leading backend teams and delivering backend APIs.
• Strong proficiency in Python and FastAPI; relational data modeling knowledge.
• Ability to translate product needs into technical plans and milestones.

Responsibilities

• Lead the technical design and hands-on implementation of core backend APIs and services.
• Set architectural direction for domain models, schemas, and API contracts.
• Mentor 3–4 senior engineers and oversee nearshore resources.
• Ensure testing, CI/CD, observability, security and reliability.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, data, and ops teams to ship features.

Skills

Hands-on technical lead

Product judgment

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

Problem solving

Strong communication

Tools

Python

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

SQLAlchemy

Alembic / Flyway

AWS (ECS, Lambda, RDS, S3, IAM)

Docker

Git

CI/CD (GitHub Actions / CodePipeline)

Terraform / Terragrunt

Job description

SITE Technologies is seeking a hands-on Lead Backend Software Engineer to lead and grow a small backend team while personally building and evolving SITE’s platform and related customer systems.

This is a player‑coach role: the Lead will directly manage 3 to 4 senior backend engineers, set technical direction, remain deeply involved in architecture, implementation, quality, and operation of critical backend systems, and oversee nearshore engineers or consultants as the team evolves.