Back End Developer – Technical Lead

Job Title: Back End Developer – Technical Lead

Location: Chennai (Onsite)
Experience: 10+ Years
Employment Type: Full-Time
Notice Period: Immediate Joiners or Up to 15 Days

Job Summary

We are seeking an experienced Back End Developer – Technical Lead with 10+ years of experience to lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, secure, and high-performance backend platforms. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for an engineer who has extensive experience making architectural decisions, designing distributed systems, and mentoring engineering teams.

The ideal candidate will have deep expertise in Python, FastAPI, distributed systems, cloud-native application development, database architecture, and modern software engineering practices. You will define backend architecture, establish engineering standards, and guide teams in building enterprise-grade applications.

Key Responsibilities

System Design & Architecture

• Design end-to-end backend architectures with a focus on scalability, resilience, maintainability, and security.
• Define service boundaries, data ownership, communication patterns, and integration strategies.
• Select and implement appropriate architectural patterns, including:
• Modular Monoliths
• Microservices
• Event-Driven Architecture
• Layered Architecture
• Hexagonal (Ports & Adapters) Architecture
• Evaluate architectural trade-offs between performance, scalability, cost, and operational complexity.
• Create Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), High-Level Designs (HLDs), Low-Level Designs (LLDs), Data Flow Diagrams, and technical documentation.
• Drive architecture reviews and establish backend engineering standards across teams.

Backend Engineering

• Design, develop, and maintain high-performance backend applications using Python and FastAPI.
• Build secure, scalable RESTful APIs, asynchronous services, and microservices.
• Develop highly concurrent applications using asynchronous programming techniques.
• Design solutions for background processing, scheduling, caching, and IO-intensive workloads.
• Enforce clean architecture, SOLID principles, design patterns, and test-driven development.
• Conduct code reviews focusing on quality, maintainability, scalability, and performance.

Data Engineering & Storage

• Design and optimize relational databases including PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Develop efficient schemas, indexing strategies, query optimization, transactions, and isolation mechanisms.
• Design scalable NoSQL data models using MongoDB, Redis, DynamoDB, or similar databases.
• Select appropriate storage technologies based on consistency, scalability, and access patterns.
• Plan database migrations, schema versioning, and backward compatibility strategies.

Distributed Systems

• Design highly available and fault-tolerant distributed systems.
• Implement strategies for:
• Retry mechanisms
• Timeouts
• Circuit breakers
• Idempotency
• Horizontal scaling
• Load balancing
• Build event-driven architectures using messaging technologies such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, Amazon SQS, or equivalent.
• Understand consistency models, replication, partitioning, and distributed transaction patterns.

Cloud & DevOps

• Design and deploy cloud-native applications on AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
• Containerize applications using Docker.
• Implement CI/CD pipelines for automated build, testing, and deployment.
• Understand Kubernetes concepts including Pods, Services, Ingress, Autoscaling, and managed Kubernetes platforms.
• Collaborate with DevOps and SRE teams on monitoring, logging, observability, and production reliability.

Technical Leadership

• Serve as the technical owner for backend platforms and services.
• Lead architecture discussions and technical decision-making.
• Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through technical guidance and code reviews.
• Define engineering best practices, coding standards, and development processes.
• Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, QA, and Business stakeholders to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Drive continuous improvement initiatives across backend engineering teams.

Required Skills & Qualifications

• 10+ years of professional experience in backend software engineering.
• Minimum 3+ years of hands-on production experience with FastAPI.
• Expert-level proficiency in Python.
• Strong expertise in designing RESTful APIs, asynchronous programming, and backend frameworks.
• Extensive experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.
• Hands-on experience with at least one NoSQL database such as MongoDB, Redis, or DynamoDB.
• Deep understanding of:
• Backend architecture patterns
• Object-Oriented Design
• SOLID Principles
• Design Patterns (GoF)
• Domain-Driven Design (DDD)
• Clean Architecture
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems, scalability, resilience, and fault tolerance.
• Experience designing and maintaining enterprise-scale backend platforms.
• Practical experience with cloud infrastructure, containerization, and deployment automation.
• Strong understanding of API security, OAuth2, JWT, authentication, and authorization mechanisms.
• Experience with Git, Agile/Scrum methodologies, and modern software development practices.
• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, or a related discipline.

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience migrating monolithic applications to microservices or evaluating architectural modernization strategies.
• Experience designing event-driven or streaming systems.
• Knowledge of API Gateways, service meshes, rate limiting, and API lifecycle management.
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, Ansible, CloudFormation).
• Exposure to observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, ELK Stack, Datadog, or OpenTelemetry.
• Previous experience as a Senior Backend Engineer, Technical Lead, Lead Backend Developer, or Solution Architect.