Backend Lead

About the Company

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.

Responsibilities

• Lead the Backend Department, driving team growth, planning, estimations, code reviews, mentoring, and performance management
• Define the architectural vision and ensure the reliability, scalability, and performance of the backend platform
• Develop and evolve the AI orchestration layer across multiple models and providers
• Own the evolution of the AI Gateway powering text, image, voice, avatar, and video generation
• Scale infrastructure and backend services to support product growth
• Maintain high engineering standards in code quality, security, observability, and operational excellence
• Deliver strategic AI initiatives, including proprietary RAG pipelines and AI agent capabilities
• Collaborate with Frontend, Mobile, QA, AI Engineering, and DevOps teams
• Partner with the Principal Engineer on infrastructure capacity planning and cost optimization

Requirements

• 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
• 3+ years of hands-on experience with NestJS
• Proven experience designing and evolving microservice architectures in production
• Deep expertise in PostgreSQL and Redis
• Experience with ORMs such as Prisma and Drizzle
• Hands-on experience with AWS (EKS, RDS, SQS, S3, CloudWatch, OpenSearch)
• Strong Docker expertise
• Experience designing reliable, scalable, and observable distributed systems
• Solid understanding of on-call processes and incident management
• Upper-Intermediate English level or higher

Preferred Qualifications

• 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 for mobile and web products
• Experience with GCP and Cloudflare
• Experience hiring engineers in fast-scaling organizations
• Commercial experience integrating AI APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google)
• Understanding of RAG, embeddings, MCP, and AI agents