Staff Backend Engineer (Tech Lead)

About the Position

Staff Backend Engineer (Tech Lead)

Soter Analytics is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer with a Tech Lead profile to join our team in Kraków. This role is for a hands-on engineering leader who can own significant parts of our backend platform and drive technical direction across the team. If you’re excited about building scalable, cloud-native systems and want real influence on a small, fast team, this is for you.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical architecture and software engineering expert services - design scalable, secure, and high-performance backend systems (Python), including microservices and event-driven architecture
• Advise on technical direction across cloud-native solutions (AWS, GCP) and containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes)
• Identify and recommend solutions to mitigate technical risks related to system performance, scalability, and maintainability
• Identify and drive refactoring opportunities to improve maintainability, scalability, and long-term system health
• Lead and mentor engineers - conduct code reviews, define and enforce good engineering practices
• Own backend services end-to-end - schema, API, deploy, on-call
• Recommend and implement automated testing frameworks (backend-first) and enforce code quality standards
• Introduce and maintain monitoring and observability practices to ensure product reliability and performance
• Own and improve CI/CD pipelines and IaC (Terraform, Ansible) - keep delivery boring and reliable
• Evaluate security vulnerabilities, provide guidance on security best practices, and ensure developed solutions are secured and threat modelled
• Collaborate closely with product managers to translate business requirements into technical solutions

Requirements

• Proven hands-on experience in backend development - Python is the primary language
• Strong background in microservices architecture and event-driven systems
• Extensive experience developing and maintaining cloud-based SaaS applications (AWS and/or GCP)
• Deep understanding of clean architecture, clean design, and SOLID principles - able to reason about system design clearly, verbally and visually, and apply these to real-world distributed systems
• Experience with containerisation technologies - Docker and Kubernetes
• Understands what automated tests are for, knows which type applies where (unit, integration, e2e), and can fit testing strategy into the overall architecture picture
• Experience with IaC tools (Terraform, Ansible) for managing cloud infrastructure
• Demonstrated ability to introduce and maintain monitoring and observability practices
• Solid backend fundamentals: APIs, SQL database design and optimisation
• Demonstrated ability to work autonomously and own systems end-to-end
• Demonstrated ability to lead and mentor engineers, conduct code reviews, and promote best practices
• Strong product focus with the ability to translate business requirements into technical solutions
• Daily hands-on use of AI development tools (Cursor, Claude Code, Copilot, or similar) - this is a hard requirement; we care about how you use the tool, not which one
• Fluent English (written and verbal)
• Self-driven, product-minded, high agency - no hand-holding needed

Autonomy

• Has owned a non-trivial backend service or platform component end-to-end for 12+ months - design, deployment, on-call, iteration on real user feedback

What You'll Work On in Your First 3 Months

• Audit and improve the architecture of our core backend services - identify and implement quick wins in performance and scalability
• Take ownership of at least one major backend service end-to-end - schema, API, deploy, on-call
• Establish or improve observability practices so system health is visible and actionable
• Conduct code reviews and introduce engineering standards that raise the bar across the team

Nice to Have

• Experience working with multi-agent AI systems
• Understanding of integration patterns with external systems
• Node.js backend experience
• Experience with LLM-powered features or AI-adjacent backend work
• Hands-on frontend experience with TypeScript, React, and Next.js

Why Join Us

• Join a small team of passionate engineers dedicated to innovation and excellence
• Work on a product that genuinely improves people’s lives and workplace safety
• Experience a startup culture: fast-paced, close collaboration, real influence on key decisions
• Short feedback loops - ship fast, learn fast
• Minimal bureaucracy - focus on what matters: building great software
• AI-first engineering culture - we embrace and invest in AI-augmented development