A growing financial technology organization is seeking a Technical Lead, Platform to lead the design, development, and evolution of its backend platform services. This position is ideal for a senior engineer who combines deep Python expertise with architecture, system design, and hands-on technical leadership. The Technical Lead will remain actively involved in coding while setting direction for backend systems, APIs, databases, and platform services. This individual will also mentor engineers, establish development standards, improve production reliability, and partner directly with technology and business leadership. This is not a people-management or architecture-only position. The successful candidate must be comfortable designing systems, writing and reviewing production code, troubleshooting difficult issues, and guiding other engineers through implementation. RESPONSIBILITIES Lead the architecture and development of Python-based backend services.Design scalable, secure, reliable, and maintainable REST APIs.Make technical and architectural decisions for backend platform capabilities.Develop, review, test, and troubleshoot production-grade Python code.Design microservices, distributed systems, and event-driven capabilities.Define relational database models and optimize SQL performance.Establish Python development standards, reusable patterns, and code-review practices.Translate business and product requirements into technical designs and deliverables.Improve application monitoring, observability, debugging, performance, and reliability.Investigate production incidents and drive root-cause resolution.Mentor junior engineers and provide direction to distributed development resources.Partner with Product, Operations, business stakeholders, and senior technology leadership.Take ownership of backend capabilities from design through production support. Role Requirements: 8+ years of backend software-engineering experience.Expert-level Python programming skills.Deep understanding of core Python concepts, libraries, patterns, and development practices.Extensive experience building production backend services and APIs.Experience with Django, Flask, and/or FastAPI.Strong REST API design and integration experience.Strong SQL, database-design, data-modeling, and optimization skills.Experience designing scalable microservices or distributed systems.Demonstrated architecture and system-design capabilities.Hands-on technical leadership and code-review experience.Experience mentoring engineers and raising development standards.Strong production-debugging and problem-solving capabilities.Ability to communicate effectively with engineering, product, operations, and business stakeholders.Ability to remain actively involved in production coding.Ability to work U.S. Business hours from within the United States. PREFERRED EXPERIENCE AWS experience, including EC2, Lambda, RDS, or S3.SQLAlchemy or comparable ORM experience.Event-driven architecture.Strong monitoring, observability, and performance-tuning experience.Lending, fintech, or financial-services technology experience.Experience within a smaller or growth-oriented technology organization.Experience leading offshore, contract, or distributed engineering resources.