Remote, but you must be in the following location
We are looking for a hands-on Team Lead who enjoys coding and working closely with a small engineering team.
This role is approximately 70% coding and 30% leadership , with a strong focus on building and optimizing high-traffic backend systems.
Design, develop, and optimize backend services using Node.js
Work on high-load systems (thousands of RPS)
Identify performance bottlenecks and improve system efficiency
Collaborate with self-managed infrastructure handling large-scale data
Mentor and support a small remote team (initially 2+ engineers)
Conduct code reviews and contribute to technical decision-making
Help onboard new team members and improve engineering practices
Use AI-assisted development tools (e.g. Copilot, Cursor)
Take ownership of features from design to production
3+ years of backend development with Node.js
1+ year of experience as Team Lead (or strong mentoring experience)
Proven experience working with high-traffic or scalable platforms
Experience leading or mentoring remote engineering teams
Strong understanding of system performance and scaling
Comfortable working outside fully managed cloud environments
English — B2 level or higher
Location: EU (required)
Experience with Python
Experience with bare-metal / self-hosted infrastructure
Experience with distributed systems or event-driven architecture
Experience optimizing latency or performance-critical services
Node.js + JavaScript (main stack)
MySQL
Python (helper scripts)
Hands-on engineering role with real technical impact
Opportunity to shape architecture and development practices
Small team with fast decision-making
Work on performance-critical, large-scale systems
Modern AI-assisted development workflow
Remote collaboration within the EU
If you enjoy solving complex backend challenges and still want to stay close to the code — we’d love to hear from you.
