Tech Lead — Backend & Platform

BASTA; New York (NY); Hybrid; USD 190,000 - 260,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Medical insurance

Dental insurance

Vision insurance

Retirement matching

Parental leave

Job summary

Basta is seeking a senior engineer to be the technical anchor of the Seekr platform, owning architecture, reliability, and evolution. You will design backend and platform architecture, guide AI/LLM integrations, and ship production code weekly while maintaining high standards for reliability and observability.

You will mentor engineers, collaborate with product, and partner with the CPTO on technical strategy, delivering high-impact features in a fast-paced, high-trust environment.

Qualifications

• 8+ years building production software with backend/platform experience.
• Experience leading as an engineering manager, tech lead, or staff+ engineer and hands-on now.
• Fluency with AI development (LLM APIs, embeddings, agentic tools) and strong engineering fundamentals.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture end-to-end: APIs, data flows, distributed processing, AI/LLM integrations, and infrastructure.
• Make foundational technical decisions with autonomy and accountability.
• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and code review.

Skills

Backend engineering

Platform architecture

Distributed systems

Mentoring teammates

AI/ML integration

DevOps

Communication

Project management

Tools

Python

FastAPI

PostgreSQL

Next.js

Celery

AWS

Job description

About Basta

Basta helps first-generation students turn college degrees into strong careers by transforming how they enter and advance in the workforce. Its flagship platform, Seekr, is powered by millions of data points from more than 70,000 first-generation career journeys and combines precision matching, personalized guidance, and structured pathways to help students secure strong first jobs. With a presence on 300+ campuses, Basta helps institutions scale career support while connecting employers to high-performing talent that traditional hiring systems often overlook, advancing economic mobility for first-generation students nationwide.

The Opportunity

You’ve led engineering teams (as a manager, tech lead, or similar) and watched AI change what one excellent engineer can do. Now you want your hands back on the keyboard, building end-to-end and owning architecture decisions instead of just attending meetings about them.

You know the why behind the how: you’ve designed systems, operated them in production, and mentored others. You’re not looking to manage a larger team; you’re looking for a platform to own and a mission worth owning it for.

About the Tech Lead Role

You’ll be the most senior permanent engineer at Basta, the technical anchor of the Seekr platform, and the person engineers, product, and leadership trust with the most important technical decisions. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role: the platform serves thousands of first-generation college students, and you’ll hold real responsibility for its architecture, reliability, and evolution.

Own the architecture, end to end:

• Design and evolve the backend and platform architecture, including APIs, data flows, distributed processing, AI/LLM integrations, and infrastructure, making durable choices that balance current velocity with long-term maintainability.
• Make foundational technical decisions and own their consequences, with both autonomy and accountability.
• Partner with the CPTO on technical strategy and roadmap, translating ambiguous product direction into buildable systems.

Build and operate, hands-on:

• Ship production code weekly across the stack (backend-weighted: Python/FastAPI, Postgres RDBMS, plus Next.js/Celery frontend), integrating LLMs, embeddings, and agentic workflows.
• Own DevOps end to end: CI/CD, AWS cloud infrastructure, observability, and the operational discipline needed to keep a small team’s platform reliable without a dedicated SRE in the near term.
• Use AI development tools to multiply your output, while knowing exactly when not to trust them.

Technical leadership:

• Mentor engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and code review, raising the bar by example.
• Collaborate with the Product Manager on project management and product delivery, keeping workstreams visible, scoped, and moving.
• Model senior engineering judgment in an AI-native codebase, explaining the why behind every how.

What Success Looks Like

In your first year, you’ve become the engineer everyone trusts with the hard calls. For example:

• You inherit and own the platform’s backend architecture and cloud infrastructure; technical decisions that used to require external senior contractors now happen in-house, faster.
• You’ve shipped significant end-to-end features and measurably improved reliability, observability, or development velocity.

The engineering team is visibly better because of your mentorship, reviews, and the standards you model.

The CPTO spends less time in tactical technical decisions and more on strategy because you’ve earned that trust.

What You Bring

• 8+ years building production software, with deep backend and platform experience; you’ve designed systems and lived with the consequences.
• Experience leading as an engineering manager, tech lead, or staff+ engineer, and a deliberate choice to be hands-on now.
• Real production operations experience: deployments, incidents, monitoring, and the unglamorous work that separates builders from prototypers.
• Fluency with modern AI development (LLM APIs, embeddings, agentic tools) grounded in strong engineering fundamentals; AI makes you faster because you already know what good looks like.
• Excellent communication and enough project management experience to run workstreams and explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical colleagues.
• Excitement about Basta’s mission and about building in a small, high-trust, high-autonomy environment. Lived experience similar to the students Basta serves is a big plus.

The Tangible Good

Basta is a remote-first hybrid organization based in NYC.

• They offer competitive compensation and benefits including medical, dental, vision, short- and long-term disability, life insurance, retirement matching, and paid parental leave.

Time off includes:

• 19 paid holidays (including a full end-of-year shutdown and one floating holiday),
• 15 vacation days (20 after year one),
• Summer Friday half-days from Memorial Day through Labor Day,
• A sabbatical after 7 years of service, reflecting a strong commitment to long-term investment in their people.

We currently support employment in NY, NJ, MA, CT, PA, and FL, and are open to other states on a case‑by‑case basis. They’re unable to sponsor employment visas at this time and do not cover relocation costs.