Backend Engineer

Short overview of the project (What technology stack is used on the project, and length of the project)

AI tourism platform looking for a Team Lead Product Engineer who uses AI to ship fast.

📚 Our stack:

Backend: Go monorepo (no framework, 3+ services)

Hosting: PaaS-managed containers, local setup fully mirrors production via Docker Compose

Tools: Jaeger tracing, Betterstack (Logging, Alerting), Redis Asynq queue

Databases: PostgreSQL, Redis

AI tooling: Claude Code (mandatory)

🚢 Products you will lead a pod on:

An AI search & recommendation engine for major travel enterprises: heavy client integration work (SSO, security reviews, GDS integrations) with demanding enterprise customers

A content enrichment API: high-scale, data- and AI-focused backend work

Partner and supplier integrations, data ingestion pipelines, LLM providers

Employment and number of hours per week/month (part-time, full-time, freelance)

Engagement: full-time, 40 hours/week

Candidate’s location and required Time Zone for work

Location: remote, within ±3 hours of CET

Timezone is the main priority, so your usual scope of EU and Ukraine within the required overlap works well. 

Language of communication

Language: English required

Functional responsibilities (What will an employee do on the project?)

⚠️ European or African timezones (±3 hours from CET) Available full-time (40 hours/week)

⚠️IMPORTANT: This is not a traditional coding role. You'll use Claude Code and other AI tools to 10x your output, always thinking about how the product or feature you are working on benefits the user. Also: we have no QA team, you OWN the quality of what you ship!

A Team Lead is the spokesperson, coordinator and facilitator for their pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients. You come from the management path, not the deep-specialist path: you have seen a lot as a developer and have consciously decided that enabling a team, working with clients and driving product outcomes is what energises you now, not coding all day.

You remain a hands-on engineer. Expect roughly 30-40% of your week on coordination, client and product work, and the rest as an individual contributor. This is not an HR-style people-management role: no performance reviews, no career coaching. As we scale, light one-on-ones and check-ins may become part of it, but the job is coordination and delivery, not administration.

What you'll actually do:

Be the spokesperson for your pod, internally with product, design and leadership, and externally with clients and partners

Coordinate work across the pod: break initiatives into chunks, sequence them, surface blockers and facilitate hand-offs (lightweight project management, we deliberately have no project managers)

Gather client requirements first-hand and funnel them straight into the pod so nothing gets lost in translation

Represent your pod in product planning sessions and bring a strong product-driven point of view to scoping and trade-offs

Help pod members with product decisions and prioritisation, enabling engineers who may be technically stronger than you

Contribute hands-on as an engineer: own features end-to-end, use Claude Code to generate Golang backend code, review AI output for quality and architectural fit

Join client meetings to align on requirements, report on delivery and keep the relationship professional and calm

Requirements for a candidate

Min 5 years of experience

2-3+ years of technical leadership experience leading a team, squad, pod or similar unit (a hard must, think team lead or early-stage engineering manager)

A developer's background (5 years minimum): you have seen production reality with your own hands before moving towards leading people

A genuinely product-driven mindset: you think about user value and business outcomes before implementation

Comfort facilitating and coordinating a pod without relying on formal authority

Willingness and ability to take part in client meetings and act as the external face of your pod

Excellent spoken and written English for planning sessions, stakeholder updates and client conversations

Ownership mentality with a strive for elegantly simple, high-quality solutions; you test your own work thoroughly since we have no QA team

Proven experience using Claude Code, share specific examples

Solid Golang experience, you'll review AI's code and you must understand how it works

Ability to do on-call once in a while to help maintain our platform's reliability & uptime

Must-Have Requirements (Team Lead — no flexibility on any)

Go (Golang): Real production experience, not just personal projects. No flexibility on other technologies.

AI/backend engineering: Deep knowledge of building and productionizing complex AI systems — observability, reliability, quality

Product mindset: Ability to think beyond engineering toward product outcomes

Leadership: Capable of leading without needing coaching or internal mentoring

English communication: Very strong, given client-facing responsibilities

Minimum 5 years of experience across the board

Candidates should be responsible for testing their own code — QA ownership expected

The Team Lead will head a small pod (not a traditional manager with direct reports)

Client-facing responsibilities begin from onboarding, with full client-facing ownership expected to grow over time

Also they will have on-call duties (now it’s during working hours and weekends, rotation among team members, but later they want to have 24/7 on call, so one person will be on-call for 24 hours (probably) and it will be compensated extra). 

Nice-to-Have

German language: A significant bonus but not required — the one criteria the client can flex on

Any special requirements for the person 

❤️ You are a great fit if you:

Made the classic developer's fork-in-the-road decision, lifelong engineer or leading people, and chose people, clients and product

Are energised by product planning sessions and have opinions about what the pod should build next, not just how

Are comfortable being the face of your pod, in internal planning rooms and on calls with enterprise clients

Enjoy enabling engineers who are technically stronger than you