Lead Backend Engineer, US Mobile
$180-240k
5G connectivity provider
Be an early applicant
5G connectivity provider
201-500 employees
Be an early applicant
$180-240k
201-500 employees
Company mission
To revolutionise wireless by building the next-generation connectivity platform.
Role
Who you are
- 12+ years of experience with Java and Spring Boot, including experience in a technical leadership or people management role
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field
- Demonstrated experience managing, mentoring, and growing backend engineers, including hiring and performance management
- Proven ability to influence technical direction and drive architectural decisions at a team or organizational level
- Strong stakeholder management skills – able to represent backend engineering’s perspective persuasively in front of executives, PMs, and cross-functional partners
- Comfort operating in a fast paced environment – wearing multiple hats across engineering, hiring, and cross-functional work
- Experience partnering with Talent/Recruiting to build and scale engineering teams – defining roles, running hiring processes, and closing candidates
- Strong experience with building and consuming REST APIs
- Hands-on experience with message brokers such as RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS
- Familiarity with MongoDB or other NoSQL database technologies
- Experience integrating and leveraging AI-assisted development tools such as Claude and Opencode to accelerate backend development, including code generation, debugging, and optimization of APIs and services
- Demonstrated ability to incorporate AI tools into the software development lifecycle, using Claude or Opencode for tasks like automated code reviews, documentation generation, and improving system design efficiency
- Solid understanding of Git, CI/CD workflows, and agile development practices
- Excellent debugging, problem-solving, and communication skills
What the job involves
- The Lead Backend Engineer owns the growth and output of a backend engineering pod — hiring, developing, and managing a small team — while remaining a strong hands-on contributor and a voice in technical direction. This is a player-coach role: you’ll write code and review architecture alongside your team, not just direct it from a distance, while also partnering with Talent to build out the team and with Engineering leadership to shape where the backend goes next
- Build and lead a team – hire, mentor, and grow a high-performing group of backend engineers as we scale
- Shape technical direction – influence architecture, tooling, and roadmap decisions across backend systems
- Stay hands-on – architect optimal solutions to our business problems and ship features alongside your team
- Scale our systems – help us grow to tens of millions of customers and connected devices
- Raise the bar – build quality tools and frameworks to ensure a high-quality product
- Protect reliability – build systems to ensure continuous uptime
- Influence technical direction and architectural decisions across backend systems – balancing pragmatism with long-term scalability
- Champion a bias toward action – prototype to resolve disagreements, ship incrementally, and avoid analysis paralysis on reversible decisions
- Model high autonomy for your team – make sound judgment calls without unnecessary approval layers, while remaining accountable for outcomes
- Continuously improve systems beyond your immediate scope – identify and fix inefficiencies, technical debt, or brittle abstractions wherever you find them, regardless of team ownership
- Develop and maintain RESTful APIs using Java (Spring Boot or related web frameworks) or Python (Flask, Django)
- Design and implement asynchronous service communication using RabbitMQ or AWS SQS/SNS
- Work with NoSQL databases like MongoDB for data modeling and storage
- Collaborate with Product, QA, and DevOps teams to deliver reliable, scalable features, representing backend engineering in cross-functional planning
- Write clean, testable, well-documented code with unit and integration tests – staying hands-on as an active contributor, not just a reviewer
- Participate in system architecture design, code reviews, and performance tuning
- Set and uphold engineering standards and best practices across your team
- Manage, mentor, and grow a team of backend engineers – owning hiring decisions, performance management, career development, and day-to-day team health
- Partner closely with Talent/Recruiting to define hiring needs, shape interview processes, and build out the backend engineering team as we scale
Our take
4G networks transformed our internet experience with faster speeds and better connectivity, and 5G is now taking this further with even quicker speeds. Although 5G is becoming more common, it remains relatively new and not universally available. Networks offering 5G can be costly and might not always match the features of 4G networks.
US Mobile provides 5G mobile data connectivity in the US, claiming to reach speeds of up to 3GB p/s through eSIMs that can be activated remotely. The company offers a range of plans from cheap "talk and text" to unlimited data packages, the latter of which comes with a variety of perks such as free streaming service subscriptions and free international calls.
Whilst the company will face competition from the growing number of 5G network providers, US Mobile stands out by focusing on providing access to all, from unlimited family 3GB p/s packages to individual basic text and call SIMs. The company also guarantees full US coverage, in addition to providing various group pool packages for families and businesses - features which should see it remain a strong option in the market.
Kirsty
Company Specialist at Welcome to the Jungle
Insights
20% employee growth in 12 months
Company
Funding (last 2 of 3 rounds)
May 2022
$31m
SERIES A
Jul 2021
$11.5m
SERIES A
Total funding: $46.5m
Company benefits
- Flexible working hours
- Gym reimbursement
- Free cellular service on the best network in the US
- Free lunch in NYC office & fully stocked kitchen
- Metrocard reimbursement
Company HQ
Midtown East, New York, NY
Leadership
Ahmed Khattak
(Founder & CEO)Founder of GSM Nation LLC from 2010 to 2015.
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