Technical Lead (Backend)

Role Overview: You will be the technical heartbeat of Habit, taking ownership of architecture, engineering culture, and delivery. As the single technical point-of-contact, you will collaborate with Product, Ops, and Leadership to set high standards for speed and quality while scaling a 10-minute food delivery platform. Your role will involve translating ambitious product goals into pragmatic and scalable technical roadmaps. Key Responsibilities: - Define the overall architecture and system design including APIs, data layer, authentication, caching, jobs, and analytics. - Own the tech roadmap, balancing feature delivery with addressing technical debt. - Establish delivery discipline by conducting reviews, testing, and managing release processes to ensure deployment safety. - Build secure and scalable cloud infrastructure, focusing on networking, secrets management, backups, and disaster recovery. - Implement monitoring, alerting, service level objectives (SLOs), and incident playbooks. - Serve as the escalation point for technical decisions and incidents. - Lead the hiring, mentoring, and growth of a high-ownership engineering team. Qualification Required: - Strong CS fundamentals encompassing data structures, algorithms, system design, concurrency, and distributed systems. - A minimum of 7 years of experience in building and scaling backend systems in production with a track record of ownership in architecture and delivery. - Proficiency in one or more backend languages, with preference for Java and familiarity with Python/Kotlin. - Solid experience with relational databases, including schema design, indexing, tuning, and transactions. - Cloud expertise, preferably in GCP, with knowledge of AWS/Azure/OCI, containers (Docker), and orchestration (Kubernetes). - Hands-on experience with CI/CD, infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform/CloudFormation, and safe deployment practices. - Practical exposure to observability tools such as Prometheus, Grafana, tracing, and incident management. - Some familiarity with data pipelines and integration points for machine learning. - Excellent communication skills to effectively collaborate with Product, Ops, and Leadership teams. - Prior experience in hiring, mentoring, and developing small engineering teams. Additional Company Details (if available): At Habit, speed is not just about food; it's how they build. The role offers end-to-end ownership, a blank canvas to establish the tech culture, and the opportunity to solve challenges that impact thousands of hungry customers on a daily basis. Think it, build it, and ship it in 10 at Habit.,