Backend Team Lead

We're hiring a Backend Team Lead at Zenzap, a communication and productivity platform designed to streamline business operations by integrating chat, task management, and workflow tools into a single, user-friendly application. This is a unique opportunity to lead senior engineers, shape complex backend architecture, and solve big scale challenges in a fast-growing environment. If you love ownership, speed, and impact - let’s talk!

About The Position

Zenzap’s backend engineering group builds a real-time, scalable system that powers our communication engine, workflow automation, integrations and AI capabilities. We're growing fast, and so is our traffic: our load doubles month over month, requiring constant innovation in design and scaling.

We’re looking for a Backend Team Lead to join R&D and report directly to our CTO. This role blends people leadership with deep architectural thinking. While hands-on work is part of the job, your main impact will come from managing senior engineers, owning architectural decisions, and driving high-scale backend systems forward.

You will have full autonomy over your domain and the opportunity to shape systems at a scalable startup.

Responsibilities and Impact

Lead a backend team of 6 senior engineers, providing technical guidance, mentorship, and people leadership.
Work directly under the CTO on architectural decisions, long-term technical planning, and strategic initiatives.
Maintain hands-on involvement (~30%), especially during onboarding and complex technical efforts.
Own system architecture: design, review, and validate high-scale distributed backend systems in Go.
Establish clear engineering standards, code quality practices, and operational excellence.
Drive execution: ensure the team delivers scalable, maintainable, and resilient systems.
Act as a multiplier for the team - helping senior engineers do their best work while creating clarity and focus.

Requirements

3+ years of engineering management experience - a must.
10 years of backend development experience, ideally in high-scale environments.
Strong architectural understanding: distributed systems, scaling patterns, tradeoffs, data flows, and distinguishing signal from noise.
Hands-on experience with Go and/or Python.
Experience in AdTech - a strong advantage.
Ability to thrive in fast-paced environments, working under ambiguity with high levels of ownership and autonomy.
Strong communication skills and the ability to work cross-functionally with product, AI, and client-facing teams.
Curiosity, leadership maturity, and a pragmatic approach to problem solving.

Why You'll Love Working at Zenzap

Extreme scale: work on systems where traffic doubles every month - rare exposure outside cybersecurity and big-tech.
AI at the core: build systems that work hand-in-hand with advanced AI models.
High-speed execution culture: fast, focused, and engineering-led.
Complete autonomy in your domain — true ownership over architecture, design, and execution.
A meaningful, high-impact engineering challenge at a company that’s growing rapidly and pushing technical boundaries.