Tech Lead - Backend

We're looking for a hands-on Tech Lead / Lead Backend Engineer who is excellent at Golang, backend systems, clean architecture, performance, debugging, and execution ownership. You do not need to already be an expert in data engineering, CDC, Apache Iceberg, Parquet, or lakehouse systems. These are things you can learn here. What matters most is that you are a strong backend/platform engineer who can understand complex systems, write reliable code, lead other engineers, and take ownership from design to production.

Responsibilities:

• Lead major backend and platform initiatives from design to production.
• Write clean, idiomatic, production-grade Golang.
• Design scalable network calls, storage and concurrency-heavy flows.
• Improve code structure, abstractions, testing patterns, error handling, and long-term maintainability.
• Profile and optimise systems for throughput, memory usage, latency, and reliability.
• Mentor engineers through code reviews, design discussions, and debugging.
• Improve logging, metrics, alerts, deployment safety, and production readiness.
• Help shape OLake's open-source engineering culture.
• Contribute to OLake-specific areas such as connectors, replication workflows, checkpointing, schema handling, and destination writers.

Requirements:

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience.
• 2+ years of strong hands-on Golang experience.
• Experience owning backend/platform projects end-to-end.
• Strong understanding of APIs, services, workers, databases, queues, concurrency, and system design.
• Practical knowledge of goroutines, channels, context, interfaces, testing, profiling, and memory behaviour.
• Experience debugging complex issues across code, infrastructure, databases, logs, and runtime behaviour.
• Familiarity with Docker, CI/CD, Linux, and at least one cloud platform such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
• Ability to write clear technical design documents and communicate tradeoffs effectively.
• Strong ownership mindset and comfort working in a fast-moving startup environment.
• Good to have, but not mandatory: Experience with data engineering, ETL/ELT, data replication, connectors, CDC, or ingestion systems.
• Familiarity with PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, Kafka, Debezium, Airbyte, Fivetran, Spark, or Flink.

Good to Have:

• You are a hands-on technical leader who still loves to code.
• You are very strong with Golang and backend/platform engineering.
• You enjoy solving complex systems problems.
• You can bring structure to ambiguity and drive projects to completion.
• You care about performance, reliability, clean design, and engineering quality.
• You enjoy mentoring engineers and raising the technical bar.
• You are excited to learn about data infrastructure deeply while building a real open-source product.