Lead Backend Engineer

The role

You will take technical ownership of the AI Gateway, generative pipelines, and mission-critical backend services. You will design backend solutions, scale services, and mentor engineers to support a rapidly scaling AI product.

What you will do

• Take technical ownership of product direction and design backend solutions
• Make decisions on scalability, reliability, performance, and system design
• Help evolve the AI Gateway for text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation
• Design and improve AI orchestration pipelines
• Scale owned services as traffic and workloads grow
• Raise engineering quality in code, architecture, security, observability, testing, and operational reliability
• Work on strategic AI initiatives including RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities
• Perform architecture and design reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and complex tasks
• Mentor engineers and share good engineering practices
• Work with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, DevOps, and Product teams

Required qualifications

• 7+ years of commercial backend development with Node.js
• 3+ years of hands-on production experience with NestJS
• Strong system design skills with experience in microservice and distributed architectures
• Experience building and scaling high-load production systems
• Deep knowledge of PostgreSQL and Redis
• Experience with ORMs such as Prisma or Drizzle
• Hands-on AWS experience
• Solid knowledge of Docker and containerized environments
• Good understanding of reliability, observability, monitoring, incident management, and on-call practices
• Experience leading or mentoring engineers
• Experience integrating AI APIs
• Upper-Intermediate English or higher

Nice to have

• Experience working with AI-assisted engineering tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or Cursor

Benefits

• Remote-first approach
• Option to visit offices in Warsaw and Kyiv
• Regular performance reviews
• Transparent growth and compensation discussions

Before you apply

• Recruitment process: Intro Call, Intro with COO & Co-founder, Test Task, Technical Interview, Final Interview, Reference Check, Offer

About the company

Zeely is the agentic AI platform for creating, launching, and scaling paid ads. It is a stable, profitable company with 200+ specialists providing AI solutions and marketing tools to small and medium businesses.