Lead Backend Developer

About Movable Ink

Movable Ink empowers marketers by enabling personalized content using data-driven content generation and AI decisioning. Trusted by leading brands worldwide, Movable Ink enhances marketing efficiency and revenue generation. Headquartered in New York City with about 600 employees, it operates globally across North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Lead Software Engineer to take a hands-on leadership role focused on backend development. This role combines big-picture architectural planning with active coding and mentoring, supporting a critical platform feature used extensively in delivering marketing messages.

Key Responsibilities

• Define and shape the technical vision, architecture, and boundaries for your team's owned services.
• Lead by doing: actively design, code, review peer work, debug, and manage production support.
• Create scalable patterns to simplify adding new features.
• Offer daily technical guidance, unblock teammates, review designs and code to elevate team standards.
• Collaborate with Engineering Managers and Product teams to translate unclear goals into practical plans and deliveries.
• Work closely with other engineering teams to ensure smooth integration and alignment of platform components.
• Drive operational excellence by establishing reliable, observable, and efficient integration services through use of monitoring tools and incident postmortems.
• Participate in broader architectural discussions, representing the integration team to align on dependencies and technical strategies.

Qualifications and Experience

• 7+ years of experience building and maintaining backend or platform systems in production environments, including proficiency with Python and other languages.
• Expertise in designing and operating distributed, stateful, and asynchronous services with a focus on reliability and scalability.
• Proven leadership in hands-on technical roles, mentoring, unblocking complex challenges, and leading major initiatives.
• Skilled at translating vague product goals into feasible technical designs and incremental development steps.
• Experience handling 3rd party integrations, understanding their complexities and failure modes.
• Knowledge of techniques such as retries, idempotency, rate limiting, backoffs, partial failure handling, and external monitoring to maintain stable service operations.
• Experience deploying scalable backend services in cloud environments, preferably with Google Cloud Platform.
• Dedication to operational excellence including implementing monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, incident response, and shared on-call duties for critical services.
• Excellent communication skills enabling alignment of technical trade-offs with product, design, engineering colleagues, and stakeholders.
• A collaborative mindset prioritizing technical quality, user value, and delivery speed in platform engineering.

Compensation and Commitment to Diversity

The annual base salary range for this role is between 147300 and 192000 USD, with the potential for additional bonuses and comprehensive benefits. Actual salary depends on experience and skills. We encourage applicants from diverse backgrounds and underrepresented groups, emphasizing an inclusive environment where differences strengthen our collective success.

Movable Ink is an equal opportunity employer welcoming applicants regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, physical or mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics.