Job Title: Technology Head – Backend
Experience: 5+ years
Job Overview
We are looking for an innovative and experienced Technology Head – Backend to lead and actively contribute to our engineering efforts. In this role, you will be a hands-on technical leader — writing and reviewing code alongside the team while also driving architecture decisions and ensuring our cloud-native microservices platform is scalable, secure, and cost-efficient. Our primary infrastructure runs on Firebase and Google Cloud Platform (GCP), with additional workloads on AWS, and our services are built as microservices using Google Cloud Functions.
You will be expected to lead by example — actively participating in development while providing strategic direction across architecture, infrastructure, team growth, and delivery.
Responsibilities
Team Leadership & Management
- Onboard and train backend and technical staff
- Actively participate in backend development alongside the team — writing, reviewing, and shipping production code
- Assign and oversee daily tasks of technical personnel, ensuring alignment with project milestones
- Hold regular team meetings to track progress and address challenges
- Define clear deliverables, roles, and responsibilities across the team
- Establish and implement training processes and strategies for all technical personnel
- Provide guidance and insight to upper management and procure stakeholder buy-in
- Report progress, including any changes made to plans and production timelines
- Work closely with the project manager to ensure timely and on-budget delivery
Architecture & System Design
- Own and evolve the overall backend architecture, ensuring it is scalable, maintainable, and aligned with business goals
- Review and approve architecture designs proposed by the team before implementation
- Lead architectural discussions, design reviews, and technical decision-making across projects
- Define and enforce architecture standards, patterns, and best practices across microservices
- Evaluate and introduce new technologies, frameworks, or architectural patterns where appropriate
- Ensure proper separation of concerns, API design standards, and data modeling across services
- Guide the team in designing fault-tolerant, event-driven, and asynchronous systems where applicable
Google Cloud Platform & Firebase
- Lead backend development and operations on GCP, with deep expertise in Google Cloud Functions as the primary microservices runtime
- Oversee Firebase services including Firestore, Firebase Auth, Realtime Database, Firebase Storage, and Cloud Messaging
- Manage GCP services including Cloud Pub/Sub, Cloud Scheduler, Cloud Run, BigQuery, Cloud Storage, and VPC configurations
- Define deployment strategies, CI/CD pipelines, and release processes on GCP
- Guide the team on best practices for cold start optimization, function composition, and stateless microservice design within Cloud Functions
- Oversee multi-environment setups (dev, staging, production) and ensure proper environment isolation
AWS Integration & Multi-Cloud Management
- Manage and maintain workloads running on AWS (e.g., S3, Lambda, EC2, RDS, or other services in use)
- Ensure seamless integration between GCP and AWS environments where cross-cloud dependencies exist
- Define clear boundaries and ownership between GCP-primary and AWS-secondary workloads
- Evaluate opportunities to consolidate or optimize across cloud providers based on cost and performance
Cost Optimization
- Continuously monitor and analyze cloud spending across GCP and AWS
- Identify and implement cost optimization strategies — including right-sizing, reserved capacity, function timeout tuning, cold start reduction, and eliminating idle resources
- Establish budgeting and alerting frameworks to prevent cost overruns
- Review architectural decisions through a cost-efficiency lens and guide the team to make cost-aware design choices
- Evaluate build-vs-buy trade-offs and third-party service costs periodically
Infrastructure, Security & Performance
- Oversee server performance monitoring, alerting, and capacity planning
- Define and enforce security best practices including IAM roles, least-privilege access, secret management, and API security
- Conduct and oversee code quality reviews; ensure code is bug-free and adheres to quality standards
- Implement logging, tracing, and observability standards across all microservices
- Manage incident response processes and drive post-mortem reviews for production issues
- Provide late night / off-hours support when needed for critical issues or production failures
Product & Delivery
- Contribute to product design, feature scoping, and technical requirement definition
- Oversee QA and user testing processes; report results and adjust requirements accordingly
- Deliver products consistently, on time, and within budget
- Ensure all new technology introductions are properly documented and relevant stakeholders are trained
Desired Skills
Technical
- Strong hands-on experience with Google Cloud Platform — especially Cloud Functions, Firestore, Firebase, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, and GCP IAM
- Solid working knowledge of Firebase services (Auth, Firestore, Storage, FCM, Remote Config)
- Experience with AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, RDS, or equivalent) and managing multi-cloud environments
- Deep expertise in microservices architecture — service decomposition, inter-service communication, event-driven patterns, and API design
- Proficiency in backend languages relevant to the stack (Node.js, Python, Go, or similar)
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and DevOps practices on GCP (Cloud Build, GitHub Actions, or equivalent)
- Familiarity with cost monitoring tools (GCP Billing, AWS Cost Explorer) and optimization techniques
- Strong grasp of security principles — IAM, secrets management, OAuth2, and data protection
Leadership & Soft Skills
- Proven ability to lead, mentor, and grow a technical team
- Strong architectural thinking with the ability to balance speed, scale, and simplicity
- Excellent communication skills — able to translate technical decisions for non-technical stakeholders
- Willingness to build professional relationships across teams and with clients
- Proactive problem-solving mindset with strong diagnostic and troubleshooting abilities
- Accountable, trustworthy, and able to build lasting relationships within the team
