Backend Team Leader – Core Infrastructure & Integrations

Description:

PlainID is looking for a technically strong Backend Team Leader to lead our Core Infrastructure & Integrations R&D team.

This is a highly hands-on leadership role, combining people management with significant involvement in architecture, design, and coding. You will take ownership of the product’s core engine and the infrastructure and integration components deployed in customer environments, ensuring reliability, performance, scalability, and seamless integration with customers’ systems.

We’re looking for a leader who enjoys solving complex engineering challenges, stays close to the code, and leads through technical expertise while supporting and developing the team.

What will you do?

• Lead and mentor a backend engineering team while maintaining a high level of hands-on development.
• Own the architecture, design, and development of the product’s core engine, infrastructure, and integration components.
• Build robust, scalable components deployed in diverse customer environments.
• Drive technical decisions and take an active role in coding, code reviews, troubleshooting, and resolving complex issues.
• Improve performance, reliability, maintainability, and deployment processes.
• Work closely with Product, other R&D teams, QA, and customer-facing teams to translate business and customer requirements into technical solutions.
• Own team delivery, balancing feature development with infrastructure improvements and engineering quality.

What are we looking for?

• Proven experience leading a backend development team while remaining highly hands-on.
• Strong backend development skills in Java and/or Go.
• Deep understanding of software architecture, distributed systems, microservices, and integrations.
• Experience developing and troubleshooting software deployed in customer environments.
• The ability to investigate complex issues across application code, infrastructure, and integrations.
• Strong ownership, sound technical judgment, and the ability to guide and develop engineers.

• B.Sc. or M.Sc. in Computer Science or Computer Engineering, or equivalent practical experience.
• 7+ years of hands-on backend development (Java, Go)
• 1–2+ years leading engineers as a team lead: setting technical direction, mentoring, and owning delivery.
• Proven experience designing distributed systems and writing architecture documents, then taking them through review to implementation.
• 5+ years of hands-on experience with relational databases: schema design, query optimization and execution plans, indexing, transactions and isolation levels, and connection pooling.
• 5+ years building and running microservices on Docker and Kubernetes, including Helm, scaling, and troubleshooting.
• Hands-on experience with API gateways and/or service mesh.
• Experience building low-latency, high-throughput services: caching (e.g., Redis), high availability, horizontal scaling, and resilience.
• Proficiency in Linux environments, including debugging, networking, and performance tools.
• Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and its managed Kubernetes .
• Experience with observability tools: metrics, logging, and tracing (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Strong written and verbal English.

Advantages

• End-to-end CI/CD from Git to production.
• Authentication and authorization background: OAuth 2.0, OIDC, JWT, SAML, and IdPs (Okta, Entra ID, Ping). Familiarity with RBAC/ABAC and policy engines (e.g., OPA/Rego) is a plus.
• Security engineering: TLS/mTLS, secrets management, and secure coding practices.
• Experience shipping software that runs in customer environments

About PlainID

PlainID is a category leader in authorization, building the future of Agentic AI access management. We solve the critical identity security challenges that keep Fortune 500 CISOs up at night, empowering global enterprises to adopt AI with confidence.

But our technology is only half the story. The other half is our people. We go beyond expectations, take ownership of our work, set a high bar for excellence, look out for one another, and have plenty of fun along the way. Here, your ideas, perspective, and contributions truly matter.

Join us to help shape a high-demand cybersecurity product, tackle meaningful challenges alongside some of the best in the industry, and be part of a supportive culture that values collaboration, initiative, and a flexible hybrid work model.