Backend Lead (Node.js) at Zeely

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 certific