About the job
Job Title: Lead Backend Engineer
Position Type: Full-Time, Remote
Working Hours: U.S. Business Hours
About the Role
Join our dynamic team at Pavago as a Lead Backend Engineer and take charge of the entire technical landscape of our innovative SaaS platform. This is a pivotal hands-on leadership role, where you'll be writing production-level code daily while making critical decisions regarding architecture, infrastructure, and AI systems for a platform designed to operate at scale.
Your responsibilities will include overseeing backend architecture, ensuring system reliability, managing AI pipelines, and guiding a small but talented development team in an agile startup environment.
Key Responsibilities
Backend Architecture & Engineering
- Design, build, and maintain a .NET 8.0 / C# backend utilizing Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles.
- Take ownership of the architecture and codebase across 14+ independently deployed microservices.
- Implement new features, refactor existing systems, and troubleshoot performance bottlenecks.
AI Systems & LLM Orchestration
- Develop and manage production-grade AI pipelines across various LLM providers.
- Optimize prompts and workflows for batch processing, personalization, and segmentation at scale.
- Handle rate limits, failover strategies, and cost optimization across AI providers.
Databases & Data Infrastructure
- Oversee MySQL, Redis, and MongoDB in production settings.
- Manage bulk writes, caching strategies, event streams, and analytics pipelines.
- Ensure data consistency and performance across distributed services.
Infrastructure, Reliability & Monitoring
- Take charge of Linux-based infrastructure, CI/CD pipelines, and service deployments.
- Implement centralized logging, monitoring, alerting, and uptime tracking.
- Proactively identify and mitigate reliability and scalability risks.
API Integrations & System Resilience
- Manage 25+ third-party API integrations utilized in production.
- Design retry, fallback, and graceful degradation strategies.
- Ensure system stability during external provider failures or degradations.
Team Leadership & Engineering Standards
- Lead and mentor a small engineering team through code reviews and architectural guidance.
- Establish and enforce engineering standards, workflows, and best practices.
- Collaborate closely with the founder on product direction and technical strategy.

