Backend Team Leader

Description:

Artlist is a leading creative technology company on a mission to empower creators and brands to bring their vision to life with video. Offering cutting-edge AI tools and models for image, video, and voiceover creation, alongside high-quality creative assets and powerful editing tools, Artlist enables creators to stay on trend, and achieve their creative goals. Trusted by over 30 million creators worldwide and top brands including Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Versace, Artlist provides a seamless, subscription-based platform with a global license, giving creators everything they need to produce professional video content efficiently. For more information, visit artlist.io.

We’re looking for an R&D Backend Team Lead to join our growing R&D department.

As the Content Discovery Team Lead, you’ll lead a high-profile team working on one of Artlist’s most strategic products.

Your team will own core backend services powering Search, Recommendations, and Discovery experiences, working closely with our AI team to turn models and data into scalable, production-grade solutions.

You’ll guide a group of talented professionals backend engineers, foster a culture of creativity, technical excellence and ownership, and play a key role in shaping how content is surfaced across the our platform.

Wake up for this

• Lead the Content Discovery Backend team, responsible for Search, Recommendation, and discovery-related services at massive scale.
• Own and evolve backend systems that power highly visible, business-critical user experiences used by millions of creators worldwide.
• Design, build, and maintain scalable, high-performance distributed systems that serve low-latency, data-intensive workloads.
• Collaborate closely with the AI team to productionize machine-learning models and recommendation logic into robust backend services.
• Partner with product, data, frontend, and AI teams to deliver impactful, data-driven discovery features.
• Provide technical leadership, mentorship, and career growth for backend engineers.
• Drive architectural decisions around scalability, reliability, performance, and observability.
• Ensure high engineering standards, clean APIs, and long-term maintainability of core systems.
• Foster a culture of ownership, quality, speed, and continuous improvement.
• Continuously improve team velocity, delivery predictability, and operational excellence.

Requirements

• 2+ years of experience leading backend or platform teams, including ownership of roadmaps and cross-team collaboration.
• 7+ years of hands-on backend software development experience, building production-grade systems at scale.
• Hands-on experience building backend services using Node.js.
• Strong experience working with cloud platforms, particularly AWS, including designing and operating cloud-native systems.
• Proven experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases, designing data models and optimizing for scale, performance, and reliability.
• Strong experience designing and maintaining distributed systems, APIs, and data-driven services
• Experience with search and recommendation systems, including hands-on work with search engines and platforms such as Elasticsearch, Algolia, Vespa AI, Azure Cognitive Search, or similar technologies— a strong advantage.
• Deep understanding of Agile/Scrum or Kanban methodologies, with a focus on iteration, delivery predictability, and measurable outcomes.
• Exceptional communication and mentorship skills — able to present technical strategy to executives, inspire engineers, and grow future leaders. Artlist is where the creative arts meet technology.