Backend Engineering Lead - Core Payroll

# Back-End Development Team Lead

The Back-End Development Team Lead manages an offshore engineering team responsible for Mercans’ global payroll platform, HR Blizz, and related solutions. The role combines technical leadership, software delivery, mentoring, and hands-on development to build secure, scalable, reliable, and high-performing backend systems.

## Key Responsibilities

### Leadership

* Lead a team of backend developers and ensure successful project delivery.
* Mentor engineers, support professional development, and promote knowledge sharing.
* Conduct technical interviews and support recruitment decisions.
* Plan team capacity and contribute to departmental and organizational goals.

### Development and Engineering

* Design and implement scalable, secure, highly available backend services and cloud infrastructure.
* Write clean, maintainable code and oversee HR Blizz integrations with client applications.
* Establish architecture, coding, testing, deployment, and engineering standards.
* Ensure code quality through unit, integration, end-to-end, and automated testing.
* Identify performance issues and automate processes to improve reliability and efficiency.
* Lead technical discovery, solution design, estimation, code reviews, and delivery planning.

### Collaboration and Documentation

* Partner with product, QA, DevOps, engineering, and business teams to translate requirements into feasible solutions.
* Participate in design discussions, technical reviews, and continuous-improvement initiatives.
* Create and maintain clear technical documentation, process diagrams, and system guidance for internal and external users.

## Qualifications

* Bachelor’s or master’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent experience.
* At least five years of backend development experience and two years leading four or more engineers.
* At least three years designing microservices.
* Four or more years working with Kotlin, Java/Spring, MySQL, MongoDB, or similar technologies.
* Strong experience building APIs and using AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
* Knowledge of SQL, event-driven architecture, RabbitMQ or similar queues, Docker, CI/CD, and test-driven development.
* Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills.
* Fluent written and spoken English.
* Practical experience using AI tools to improve engineering efficiency, decision-making, and innovation.

## Preferred Skills

* Kubernetes and container orchestration.
* Monitoring and alerting platforms.
* Automation experience in HR, payroll, or finance domains.

## Performance Goals

1. **Deployment process:** Document and standardize deployment and migration procedures, including rules, responsibilities, diagrams, and supporting guidance. Align documentation with engineering leadership and review it regularly.
2. **Task Runner documentation:** Create a single source of truth describing Task Runner initiation and execution flows for each service, enabling future troubleshooting and optimization.
3. **Static analysis:** Deliver a proof of concept using the free version of SonarQube or a similar tool. Configure basic quality gates and common static-analysis rules.
4. **Code reviews:** Ensure each participating engineer, including the Team Lead, completes at least two code reviews per sprint.
5. **Acceptance defects:** Keep tasks reopened after reaching the acceptance environment below 20% per sprint through effective testing, reviews, and static analysis.
6. **Production reopen rate:** Keep tasks reopened after production release below 15% per sprint by improving solution quality and release validation.
7. **Estimation accuracy:** Ensure actual delivery time does not exceed the original estimate by more than 1.6 times. Improve discovery, requirement analysis, decomposition, grooming, and planning.
8. **Task Runner optimization:** Create and execute a realistic optimization plan with the backend team, achieving at least twice-faster report generation and period-closure processing.