About the job We're looking for an Head of Technology : who can own the technical health and growth of our backend platform. You'll be part architect, part tech lead, part engineering manager. You won't just review code — you'll set the standard for how code is written, how systems are designed, and how the team thinks about quality, cost, and customer impact. This is not a senior IC role where you write code all day. And it's not a pure management role where you're in meetings all day. It's the balance between the two — the person who makes the team better while staying close enough to the code to make good decisions What You'll Own • System Reliability & Upkeep • Own the health of a production multi-tenant Node.js/TypeScript backend serving real-time messaging traffic • Lead incident response, root cause analysis, and post-mortem culture • Identify and drive reduction of technical debt — proactively, not reactively • Ensure monitoring, alerting, and observability are in good shape (we use New Relic, Sentry, Pino structured logging) • Work across multiple backend services and ensure they integrate reliably • Scalable, Quality Engineering • Design and review system architecture decisions — schema changes, service boundaries, async workflows (we use Temporal.io), queue design • Drive engineering standards: code review culture, PR quality, test coverage, error handling patterns • Establish and enforce engineering practices that let the team ship fast without accumulating hidden risk • Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with a clear eye on long-term maintainability • Cost Consciousness • Maintain a clear understanding of infrastructure costs (AWS, third-party APIs, LLM usage, DB compute) • Actively flag cost anomalies and propose architectural or operational changes to address them • Balance engineering investment against business return — know when "good enough" is the right call • Team Standards & Culture • Set a high bar for code quality — not pedantry, but clarity, maintainability, and correctness • Build a review culture where feedback is constructive, specific, and educational • Help engineers grow by pair debugging, design reviews, and code walkthroughs • Define and document coding conventions, architecture patterns, and engineering principles that persist beyond any individual • Customer Empathy • Understand that the systems you build serve real D2C businesses who depend on them to communicate with their customers • Treat reliability issues with the urgency of a customer escalation, not a backlog item • Stay connected to what support and product teams are seeing from customers — let that shape engineering priorities • Communication & Stakeholder Management • Translate technical complexity into clear, honest language for non-technical co-founders and stakeholders • Communicate risk, timelines, and tradeoffs clearly — no sugar-coating, no unnecessary alarm • Manage up: surface the right problems at the right time without waiting to be asked • Manage expectations — both internally with the team and externally with leadership • Balancing Tradeoffs • Navigate the tension between shipping fast and building right — and be able to articulate why you chose one over the other • Know when to take on short-term debt and when to push back • Make architectural decisions that serve the next 18 months, not just the next sprint What We're Looking For Must Have • 7–8 years of backend software engineering experience, with at least 2 years in a lead or staff-level role • Strong command of TypeScript/Node.js in production (our primary stack) • Deep understanding of multi-tenant SaaS architecture patterns • Hands-on experience with relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL), ORM usage (TypeORM or similar), and writing efficient queries at scale • Experience designing and operating async/event-driven systems (message queues, workflow engines, or similar) • Comfort with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred) and cost/performance monitoring • Strong pull request review discipline — you know what makes a good review and what makes a bad one Strong Plus • Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Socket.IO, pub/sub patterns) • Exposure to LLM integration, RAG pipelines, or AI feature development in production • Experience with Temporal.io or similar workflow orchestration • Familiarity with WhatsApp Business API, omnichannel messaging, or e-commerce integrations • Prior experience at a startup in the 10–100 person range where you had to set standards, not just follow them What We Don't Need • Someone who needs a perfectly defined problem before they can start • A pure IC who avoids people and process • A pure manager who's lost touch with the code • Someone who optimises for their own comfort over team outcomes How You Think • You ask "why does this fail in production?" before asking "why didn't someone write a test?" • You think about the developer who reads your code six months from now • You're bothered by silent failures, swallowed errors, and fire-and-forget async calls • You believe good documentation and clear naming are not optional extras • You have opinions on architecture but hold them loosely when presented with better evidence • You understand that a cost spike is an engineering problem, not just a finance problem • You treat a customer-facing bug with more urgency than a refactor that only benefits the team What You'll Walk Into We'll Be Transparent With You • A production codebase with real technical debt alongside genuinely good architecture • A fast-moving team that ships frequently • A company that takes reliability seriously but is still building the culture around it • Multiple backend services that need to be held together with clear ownership and standards • A product that's expanding into AI agents, voice workflows, and deeper e-commerce automation — meaning the technical surface area is growing fast • This is a role for someone who thrives in that kind of environment — not someone who needs it to be clean before they can contribute. What We Offer • Meaningful ownership — you'll shape how engineering works here, not just execute someone else's vision • Direct access to founders and product decisions • Competitive compensation (cash + equity discussion based on profile) • A product that real businesses depend on every day — your work matters immediately Skills:- Javascript, NodeJS (Node.js) and TypeScript