Lead Backend Software Engineer

If your career has been 'senior engineer who builds great systems', but you have never been accountable for a team's sprint delivery, coached engineers day-to-day, this role is not the right fit, regardless of your technical depth.

We have seen technically exceptional candidates fail on this criterion. We are hiring a Lead, not a Principal Individual Contributors.

The 9-Point Self-Qualification Checklist

Every item below is a hard requirement. If you cannot tick all 9 with evidence from your CV, please do not apply. We do not make exceptions for strong technical scores.

Node.js is your PRIMARY backend language - not Java, Python, PHP, or .NET. Your recent roles are Node.js-native. Express and/or NestJS are second nature.

You have led a squad of 3-5 engineers - with explicit accountability for sprint delivery, not just 'mentoring'. Your CV names team sizes and outcomes, not just titles.

You have owned sprint commitments to a Product Owner - including handling delivery slips, descoping, and communicating proactively when timelines are at risk.

You have coached engineers day-to-day - regular 1:1s, specific code review feedback, structured development plans. Not just 'I help junior devs when asked.'

You have designed and run a technical hiring loop - written criteria, conducted interviews, provided written hiring recommendations. 'I sat on a panel once' does not qualify.

You have owned PostgreSQL in production - schema design, complex queries, migrations, indexing. Not just querying a database someone else designed.

You have deployed and operated services on AWS - EKS (or equivalent managed Kubernetes), IAM, S3, Secrets Manager. Not just 'we used AWS'.

You have been the primary incident responder - diagnosed under pressure, coordinated a fix, wrote a postmortem. Not just 'I helped fix a bug'.

Your CV contains specific metrics - latency numbers, uptime percentages, throughput figures. 'Improved system performance' is not enough. Numbers are required., As Lead Backend Engineer at NOQ, you own your squad - a small group of developers and QA engineers working to a shared Product Owner. You are not a senior developer who advises on architecture and then hands off to others. You are accountable for sprint delivery, code quality, and the reliability of your squad's output in production. You write code, you review code, you set the standards, and you coach your team to meet them., Squad Leadership & Sprint Delivery

• Own sprint planning, capacity commitment, and backlog finalisation for your squad - accountable for delivery predictability, not just velocity.

• Lead daily standups, identify blockers before they escalate, and resolve delivery slips within your squad without waiting for EM escalation.

• Maintain a Definition of Done and enforce it on every PR - no feature ships unless it meets the bar you set.

• Manage sprint-level risk and communicate scope changes proactively to the Product Owner.

Technical Delivery & Code Quality

• Write, review, and approve PRs across your squad - you are the technical gatekeeper, not a passive reviewer.

• Enforce quality gates in CI/CD pipelines and work with QA on automated testing strategy and regression coverage.

• Lead feature and module design within your squad; escalate cross-cutting decisions to the Architect with a clear problem statement and proposed approach.

• Own post-release monitoring and verification - you confirm that what shipped works, not just that it compiled.

• Drive codebase refactoring inside your squad in line with the MongoDB * PostgreSQL migration strategy.

Incident Response & Reliability

• Serve as incident commander for production issues within your squad's domain - diagnose, triage, coordinate fix, and own communication to stakeholders via the PO.

• Own reliability improvements: monitoring, alerting, observability - not waiting to be told there's a problem.

• Write and drive post-incident technical corrective actions, coordinating with the Architect on systemic fixes.

• Understand the platform's offline-first, high-footfall constraints - events process millions of pounds in minutes and cannot tolerate silent failures.

People Leadership & Coaching

• Provide day-to-day coaching and feedback to the developers in your squad - code reviews that explain the why, 1:1s that track growth, conversations that change how someone writes code.

• Lead the technical interview loop for backend developer hires: design the screening criteria, conduct technical interviews, and provide a clear written recommendation.

• Identify skill gaps in your squad early and work with the EM on development plans and growth pathways.

Security & Compliance

• Apply and enforce NOQ's security patterns: PII encryption at rest (AES-256-GCM), HMAC-SHA256 inter-service auth, ES256 JWT token validation, secrets injection via AWS Secrets Manager.

• Contribute to NOQ's custom IAM architecture: passwordless OTP, ECDH device binding, OAuth 2.1 + PKCE, RBAC model across 4 entity types.

• Flag security risks in PR reviews; ensure no feature ships with insecure data handling, hardcoded secrets, or unvalidated input paths.

Do you have experience in TypeScript?, This role is deeply stack-specific. If your primary backend experience is in Java, Python, PHP, or .NET, this is not the right role. If you are a Node.js native who has run production systems on AWS with Kubernetes, read on.

Core Backend - Node.js · Express · NestJS · TypeScript · PostgreSQL (Aurora)

Legacy / Migrating - MongoDB Atlas * being phased out; full migration underway

Infrastructure - AWS EKS (Kubernetes) · ArgoCD (GitOps) · Docker · AWS S3 · AWS SES · AWS Secrets Manager

Auth & Security - Custom IAM: passwordless OTP * ECDH device binding * ES256 JWT · OAuth 2.1 + PKCE auth server · AES-256-GCM PII encryption · HMAC-SHA256 inter-service auth

Real-Time - WebSockets (Notification Service) · Firebase (config push) · PostgreSQL-backed retry/TTL

Offline Patterns - Store-and-Forward (SQLite queue) · WatermelonDB (EPOS V3) · offline-first POS with conflict resolution

Environments - DEV · QA · PROD - GitOps branching from master; ArgoCD deploys; hotfix model, Candidates who demonstrate several of the following will score significantly higher and proceed faster through the interview process.

• GitOps delivery with ArgoCD or Flux in a Kubernetes environment - not just 'used Helm charts'

• NestJS experience - decorators, dependency injection, module architecture, interceptors

• Live database migration experience - schema migration, dual-write patterns, cut-over strategies with zero downtime

• Custom auth / IAM system design - you have thought deeply about identity, device trust, and token lifecycles beyond 'use Auth0'

• WebSocket-based notification or real-time systems in a stateful, multi-replica environment

• Offline-first mobile/POS backend patterns - store-and-forward, conflict resolution, eventual consistency

• Payment or fintech domain experience - Adyen, Stripe, PCI-DSS awareness, webhook security

• Event-driven systems - PostgreSQL-backed task queues, background job reliability, idempotency patterns

• Startup or scale-up environment at Series A or earlier - comfortable with ambiguity and imperfect information

NOQ builds the financial operating system for live events - connecting vendors, organisers, and audiences through a single intelligent platform that manages every transaction, from cashless payment to post-event analytics. We serve festivals, stadiums, food halls, and entertainment venues across the UK and Europe., The NOQ engineering team is 20 people: in-house UK team, and a larger offshore development squad in India. The in-house UK engineers are the technical conscience of the business: close to clients, accountable for roadmap discipline, and the bridge between offshore velocity and strategic direction.