The Back-End Development Team Lead manages an offshore engineering team responsible for Mercans’ global payroll platform, HR Blizz, and related solutions. The role combines technical leadership, software delivery, mentoring, and hands-on development to build secure, scalable, reliable, and high-performing backend systems.
- Lead a team of backend developers and ensure successful project delivery.
- Mentor engineers, support professional development, and promote knowledge sharing.
- Conduct technical interviews and support recruitment decisions.
- Plan team capacity and contribute to departmental and organizational goals.
- Design and implement scalable, secure, highly available backend services and cloud infrastructure.
- Write clean, maintainable code and oversee HR Blizz integrations with client applications.
- Establish architecture, coding, testing, deployment, and engineering standards.
- Ensure code quality through unit, integration, end-to-end, and automated testing.
- Identify performance issues and automate processes to improve reliability and efficiency.
- Lead technical discovery, solution design, estimation, code reviews, and delivery planning.
- Partner with product, QA, DevOps, engineering, and business teams to translate requirements into feasible solutions.
- Participate in design discussions, technical reviews, and continuous-improvement initiatives.
- Create and maintain clear technical documentation, process diagrams, and system guidance for internal and external users.
- Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
- At least five years of backend development experience and two years leading four or more engineers.
- At least three years designing microservices.
- Four or more years working with Kotlin, Java/Spring, MySQL, MongoDB, or similar technologies.
- Strong experience building APIs and using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
- Knowledge of SQL, event-driven architecture, RabbitMQ or similar queues, Docker, CI/CD, and test-driven development.
- Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills.
- Fluent written and spoken English.
- Practical experience using AI tools to improve engineering efficiency, decision-making, and innovation.
- Kubernetes and container orchestration.
- Monitoring and alerting platforms.
- Automation experience in HR, payroll, or finance domains.
- Deployment process: Document and standardize deployment and migration procedures, including rules, responsibilities, diagrams, and supporting guidance. Align documentation with engineering leadership and review it regularly.
- Task Runner documentation: Create a single source of truth describing Task Runner initiation and execution flows for each service, enabling future troubleshooting and optimization.
- Static analysis: Deliver a proof of concept using the free version of SonarQube or a similar tool. Configure basic quality gates and common static-analysis rules.
- Code reviews: Ensure each participating engineer, including the Team Lead, completes at least two code reviews per sprint.
- Acceptance defects: Keep tasks reopened after reaching the acceptance environment below 20% per sprint through effective testing, reviews, and static analysis.
- Production reopen rate: Keep tasks reopened after production release below 15% per sprint by improving solution quality and release validation.
- Estimation accuracy: Ensure actual delivery time does not exceed the original estimate by more than 1.6 times. Improve discovery, requirement analysis, decomposition, grooming, and planning.
- Task Runner optimization: Create and execute a realistic optimization plan with the backend team, achieving at least twice-faster report generation and period-closure processing.