Job Detail
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Job ID 6686
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Experience 8 Years +
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Industry SAAS
Job Description
Head of Backend Engineering
Location: London, UK (Hybrid – 2 days/week)
Salary: £100,000 – £140,000 + equity
We’re searching for a visionary Head of Backend Engineering to join our senior engineering leadership team and take ownership of our backend systems at scale. You’ll lead a team of 20+ talented backend and DevOps engineers, shaping the architecture, ensuring high performance and availability, and driving engineering excellence across the board.
As part of a tight-knit leadership trio—including our CTO and Head of Mobile Engineering—you’ll collaborate on initiatives that impact the entire company, ensuring our backend capabilities evolve in step with our global ambitions.
👉 Curious about our engineering culture? Take a look at what we’ve been working on: https://engineering.muzz.com
What You’ll Be Doing
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Lead and scale a 20+ person team of backend and DevOps engineers
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Define and uphold backend best practices across squads, working through team leads
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Improve developer experience by driving initiatives in our Platform Core squad—faster releases, reduced technical debt, and higher dev satisfaction
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Tackle company-wide technical challenges as part of the engineering leadership team
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Support and mentor engineering leads, enabling them to excel in their roles
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Oversee uptime, performance, and reliability of the entire backend platform
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Continuously profile and optimise systems to improve efficiency and reduce cloud costs
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Guide architectural decisions for new features to ensure simplicity and scalability
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Stay hands-on where needed—write and review code to support your team
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Collaborate with the Data Engineering team to maintain seamless data pipelines
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Own and refine our Incident Management process, ensuring we learn from every incident
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Stay ahead of the curve on AWS tools and services, identifying opportunities to improve infrastructure
What We’re Looking For
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8+ years in backend engineering roles, with 5+ years leading teams
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Proven experience mentoring, growing, and enabling engineering talent
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Strong systems architecture experience and technical decision-making ability
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A product-first mindset—comfortable making fast, thoughtful decisions based on impact
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Experience working in high-growth startup environments
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Strong scripting capabilities (e.g., Bash, Python)
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Deep expertise in AWS (we use 40+ AWS services)
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Experience with infrastructure as code and containerisation (Terraform, Docker)
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Hands-on knowledge of:
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Compute: ECS, EKS, Lambda
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Networking: VPC, subnets, gateways
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Storage: S3, EBS, Parquet
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Databases: RDS, DynamoDB
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Protocols: HTTP, TCP, gRPC, DNS
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IAM and access control
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Familiarity with cost management tools like AWS Cost Explorer
Bonus Points For
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Strong Go experience (especially with gRPC and event-driven architectures)
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Experience with GCP or hybrid cloud environments
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Advanced EC2 usage (e.g., spot fleets)
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Exposure to services like Amazon Neptune, Athena, Kinesis, or Kafka
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Hands-on Kubernetes experience in production
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B2C product experience, particularly in consumer apps
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Familiarity with payment systems (e.g., Stripe, Google Play, Apple App Store)
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Background in social apps or dating platforms
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Leadership experience in fast-scaling organisations
Join us at a pivotal moment as we scale globally, and lead the backend systems that power millions of users.
Apply now.
Required skills
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