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Job opportunity
Backend Lead (Node.js)
Zeely Inc.
Remote
Source: Zeely Inc. careers · View original posting
Employer job description
From Zeely Inc.'s posting. “We” and “our” refer to the employer.
Join us as a Backend Lead and drive the 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 experience in building and scaling engineering teams.
In this role, you will have true ownership of our AI Gateway, generative pipelines, and mission-critical backend services powering a product already trusted by more than 1.5 million users.
Zeely AI is an AI-powered platform that helps small businesses create viral UGC videos, advertising banners, and high-performing campaigns across Meta and TikTok, making it easier for entrepreneurs to grow and scale their businesses.
Your key responsibilities:
- Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and engineers' performance management
- Define the architectural vision and ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform
- Develop and evolve our AI orchestration layer across multiple models and providers, optimizing generation quality, latency, and cost efficiency
- Own the evolution of the AI Gateway — the core platform component powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation
- Scale infrastructure and backend services to support product growth and increasing workloads
- Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and operational excellence
- Deliver strategic AI initiatives, including our proprietary RAG pipeline, MCP integrations, and AI agent capabilities
- Collaborate closely with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, and DevOps teams to achieve business goals
- Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure capacity planning and cost optimization
What we’re looking for:
- 7+ years of commercial experience with Node.js
- 3+ years of experience in a Lead, Team Lead, or Engineering Manager role with direct people management responsibilities
- 3+ years of hands-on experience with NestJS
- Proven experience designing and evolving microservice architectures in production environments
- Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis
- Experience working with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle
- Hands-on experience with AWS services, including EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, and OpenSearch
- Strong Docker expertise
- Experience designing reliable, scalable, and observable distributed systems
- Solid understanding of on-call processes and incident management practices
- Upper-Intermediate English level or higher
- Nice to have: Active AWS Architect or Developer certification
- Experience with Terraform
- Experience building high-load systems and optimizing cost/latency trade-offs
- Payment systems integration experience
- Backend development experience for mobile applications (iOS/Android) and web products
- Experience with GCP and Cloudflare
- Experience hiring engineers and building processes in fast-scaling organizations
- AI expertise we value: Commercial experience integrating AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and others)
- Understanding of multi-model orchestration, including routing, fallback strategies, and cost/latency trade-offs
- Experience with AI-assisted development and code review tools (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, etc.)
- Understanding of RAG, embeddings, MCP, and AI agents (hands-on experience is a strong plus)
- Why it’s exciting to work with us: Work with cutting-edge technologies and contribute to building AI-powered tools
- Join a strong A-level team that motivates you to grow and achieve more
- Remote-first approach: work from anywhere, with the option to visit our offices in Warsaw and Kyiv
- Paid day offs and sick leaves — we care about your work-life balance
- Regular performance reviews to ensure your growth is transparent and rewarded
- Financial support — consultations for private entrepreneurs from our dedicated finance team
- Recruitment process: Intro Call → Test Task → Technical Interview → Final Interview → Reference Check → Offer
- Send us your CV — we'd love to get to know you!
About this listing
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