Staff Backend Engineer (Regional Tech Lead)

About the Role

Join an overseas backend team as the regional technical lead. You will be the first responder and incident commander for regional production issues, lead the local team (backend engineer and SRE) to keep the region stable, and drive the design and development of App backend modules. The mix of troubleshooting, development, and operations work will shift with business needs.

Responsibilities:

1. Own regional production issues: act as incident commander for the region; use logs, monitoring, tracing, and data backtracking to identify root causes of errors, user reports, and data anomalies; drive fixes to closure, lead postmortems, and land improvement items. Primarily for your region, with support to other regions when needed
2. Regional stability and operations: hold production access for the region and independently perform releases, rollbacks, scaling, and emergency response; design and maintain regional monitoring, alerting, degradation plans, and incident runbooks
3. Backend design and development: lead the design, API development, and core code maintenance of App backend modules (user, community, commerce, campaigns, messaging); own technical design review and code review for changes made in the region
4. Data compliance and access governance: query and handle production data under the company's data classification and access policies; deliver analysis that is accurate and reproducible; build regional processes and tooling for data access
5. Team leadership: lead 1-2 local engineers (backend / SRE), covering task assignment, technical coaching, and performance feedback; serve as the liaison between the region and the HQ engineering team
6. Tooling and efficiency: turn recurring investigations into scripts, runbooks, and self-service tools to reduce repetitive work and improve regional support efficiency

Requirements:

• Bachelor's degree or above; Computer Science / Software Engineering preferred
• 8+ years of Java backend development, including 2+ years as a tech lead or people manager
• Expert in Java and Spring Boot, with experience architecting and refactoring complex business systems; familiar with Spring Cloud or similar microservice stacks
• Strong database skills: complex MySQL queries, indexing and execution plans, slow query optimization, and capacity assessment
• Proficient with Redis; familiar with Kafka / RocketMQ internals and common pitfalls
• Hands-on experience troubleshooting high-traffic production services and independently commanding incident response
• DevOps skills as described below
• Rigorous and detail-oriented; committed to accurate, reproducible results and documented investigations

DevOps Requirements

• Solid working knowledge of core AWS services (EC2, ALB, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, IAM, CloudWatch); able to independently troubleshoot networking, permission, and resource issues
• Proficient with Docker and Kubernetes; able to deploy, roll back, scale, and debug services independently
• Experience configuring and maintaining CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins, GitLab CI, or similar)
• Familiar with observability stacks such as Prometheus / Grafana / ELK; able to design alert rules and dashboards
• Familiarity with infrastructure-as-code tools such as Terraform is a plus

Nice to Have

• Experience building products deployed across multiple regions; comfortable with cross-time-zone collaboration
• Experience managing cross-border or remote teams
• Experience triaging and resolving customer complaints or support tickets
• Backend experience in IoT / smart hardware / parenting or health applications
• SRE or platform engineering background