Backend Department Lead (Node.js)
Zeely Inc.· enterprise· AI Marketing· Jun 9, 2026 · 5mo agoPosted 140 days ago
United States
Remote
Full-time
Lead
$130K–$203K est.
7+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open since June 9, 2026 — 140 days, and still accepting applications.
Job description
Join us as a Backend Department Lead and drive the technical direction and development of the backend platform behind one of the fastest-growing AI products in the US market.
We are looking for a strong technical leader who combines deep expertise in high-load system architecture with hands-on engineering leadership and experience in building and developing high-performing backend teams. In this role, you will have real technical ownership of our AI Gateway, generative pipelines, and mission-critical backend services powering a product already used by more than 2 million people.
About Us:
Zeely is the agentic AI platform for creating, launching, and scaling paid ads.
Simply put: we've made the best AI solutions and marketing tools available to small and medium businesses — tools that used to be reserved for big brands with expensive marketing teams.
The next big step: a B2B solution for large marketing teams and enterprise clients — workflows, creative analytics, and full control over campaigns across the whole team. For companies where performance marketing already runs at scale and needs more efficiency and automation.
A few numbers that speak for themselves:
- 4 years on the market — a stable, profitable company backed by international investors;
- 6× growth over the past year;
- 2,000,000+ businesses already use Zeely;
- #1 in its category in the US market;
- 200+ specialists on the team;
- Markets: US + worldwide.
Your Key Responsibilities:
- Lead the Backend Department and set the technical direction for a team of 15+ backend engineers;
- Own backend architecture and drive key technical decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, and system design;
- Lead the evolution of our AI Gateway — the core platform layer powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation across multiple AI models and providers;
- Design and evolve AI orchestration pipelines, optimizing routing, fallback strategies, generation quality, latency, and cost;
- Scale backend services and infrastructure to support growing product traffic and increasingly complex workloads;
- Drive engineering excellence across code quality, architecture, security, observability, testing, and operational reliability;
- Lead strategic backend and AI initiatives, including our proprietary RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities;
- Stay hands-on with architecture, design reviews, code reviews, troubleshooting, and technically complex initiatives;
- Grow the backend team through mentoring, performance management, technical development, hiring, and strong engineering practices;
- Collaborate closely with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, DevOps, and Product teams to translate business goals into scalable technical solutions;
- Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure strategy, capacity planning, reliability, and cost optimization.
What We Are Looking For:
- 7+ years of commercial backend development experience with Node.js;
- 3+ years in a technical leadership role such as Backend Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Lead;
- Experience leading and developing backend engineers, including mentoring and performance management;
- 3+ years of hands-on production experience with NestJS;
- Strong system design skills and proven experience designing and evolving microservice and distributed architectures;
- Experience building and scaling high-load production systems;
- Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis, including performance optimization, data modeling, and caching strategies;
- Experience with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle;
- Hands-on experience with AWS, including EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, and OpenSearch;
- Strong practical knowledge of Docker and containerized environments;
- Strong understanding of reliability, observability, monitoring, incident management, and on-call practices;
- Ability to balance architectural strategy with hands-on engineering and pragmatic delivery;
- Upper-Intermediate English or higher.
Nice To Have:
- Active AWS Solutions Architect or Developer certification;
- Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools;
- Experience optimizing infrastructure and architecture for cost, latency, and performance at scale;
- Payment systems integration experience;
- Backend experience across both mobile applications and web products;
- Experience with GCP and Cloudflare;
- Experience hiring and scaling engineering teams in fast-growing product companies.
AI Expertise We Value:
- Commercial experience integrating AI APIs such as OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or other model providers;
- Experience designing multi-model orchestration systems, including routing, fallbacks, retries, rate limits, and cost/latency optimization;
- Understanding of production challenges around AI workloads, including reliability, observability, and provider dependencies;
- Experience with AI-assisted engineering and code review tools such as Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, or similar;
- Understanding of RAG, embeddings, vector search, MCP, and AI agents;
- Hands-on production experience is a strong plus.
Why it’s exciting to work with us:
- Take technical ownership of the backend platform behind a rapidly scaling AI product;
- Shape architecture and engineering standards across a strong backend organization;
- Work on real production challenges around high-load systems, AI orchestration, distributed architecture, and infrastructure at scale;
- Build with cutting-edge AI technologies and directly influence how they are integrated into the product;
- Join a strong engineering team with significant autonomy and direct impact on product and technical decisions;
- Remote-first approach: work from anywhere, with the option to visit our offices in Warsaw and Kyiv;
- Regular performance reviews with transparent growth and compensation discussions.
Recruitment process:
Intro Call → Intro with COO & Co-founder → Test Task → Technical Interview → Final Interview → Reference Check → Offer.
Send us your CV — we'd love to get to know you!
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