Backbase
(RD) Engineering Team Lead (ETL)
How your CV stacks up
Upload your CV to see how well it fits this job role
?%
(RD) Engineering Team Lead (ETL)
Senior Engineer – Squad Captain
About the Role
This is a Senior+ Engineer role aimed at technologists who thrive at the intersection of hands-on execution and people leadership—not someone who once coded but now manages others. If you can’t debug an issue, unblock a team, or write production-grade code while also coaching a squad of engineers, this is your position.
You’ll command a single squad, setting expectation for delivery predictability, engineering quality, and team growth. Your split will be roughly: • 70% technical leadership and direct contribution • 20% delivery and execution • 10% people management
You must be comfortable spending time in design reviews, codebases, and crisis response, while also building and leading a squad of 6–9 engineers with intentional coaching and informed hiring decisions.
Key Responsibilities
Technical Leadership (70% of the role)
-
System Design & Architecture
- Lead and participate in design reviews, RFCs, and critical architecture trade-offs alongside Staff Engineers.
- Ensure scalability, security, and resilience are baked in from the outset.
- Act as a Bill of Systems (BS) detector to challenge fragility and blind spots before they escalate risks.
-
Hands-On Credibility
- Maintain active engagement with code via code reviews, debugging, and unblocking (you write code, read code, and understand it).
- On-call roster participation and technical crisis leadership.
- Champion emergency response protocols—you’ll need to step in, assist, or coordinate under pressure.
-
Engineering Quality & Automation
- Drive AI-native workflows, agentic coding/support tools, and LLM-driven productivity (e.g., automated test generation, AI-assisted query debugging).
- Advocate for modern CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and observability as non-negotiable pillars of quality.
- Ensure features reach production reliably with controlled rollouts, quality gates, and proactive monitoring.
People Leadership (20% of the role)
- Talent Growth & Development
- Item owners for 1:1 coaching, performance calibrations, and evidence-driven career journeys.
- Deliver goal-driven growth plans—engineers should visibly progress whilst retaining technical full-stack skills.
- Team Dynamic & Safety
- Model and reinforce a culture of psychological safety, resilience, and healthy pace.
- Shape an engineering DNA that unites purpose with precision—sustained because it’s sensible.
Reasons to use Rodeo
Start with a chat, not a search bar
Grad scheme, placement, apprenticeship? Not sure what you want yet — that's fine. Your agent talks it through with you and turns "I have no idea" into a shortlist.
It searches the market for you
Every day your agent scans the market matching roles against what actually matters to you, not just keywords on a CV.
Only hits
No noise. No "maybe this fits." Just roles with a clear explanation of why they're right — and where to focus when applying.
-
Hiring & Succession
- Influence and approve hires in alignment with squad ideals, with a carefully balanced mix of experience levels.
- Lead knowledge-share workshops to ensure no single person is the sole repository of critical wisdom.
-
Conflict & Resolution
- Pre-empt friction before it evolves into a blocker by fostering early partnerships and open communication.
- Comfortably handle tough but constructive conversations when needed.
Delivery & Execution (10% of the role)
-
Process & Improvement
- Measure and improve the end-to-end delivery cycle—trace delivery momentum from idea to impact.
- Active empirical decision-making on processes, tools, and compliant escalation paths.
-
Stakeholder Collaboration
- Partner seamlessly with Product Managers and Domain Architects to align goals without losing technical rigor.
- Quantify trade-offs, not just muscle opinion—demand data-backed priorities.
-
Awareness & Transparency
- Enhance input/output mechanisms so all engineers and stakeholders track progress individually and as a cohort.
What We Seek
Technical Depth & Proven Execution
- 5+ years of professional software engineering, with a history of owning production code contributions.
- Mastery of both system-level design and implementable goodness across system-of-record data (e.g., payments, transactions, audit flows).
- First-hand experience with distributed systems, set-based operations/parallelism for high-throughput scenarios.
- Adaptive competence with domain-specific constraints (e.g., banking guarantees, regulatory compliance) and awareness of retry/backoff strategies for flaky systems.
- A partner Intelligence Agentry perspective: ability to debug both code-to-metrics and tools like Cursor/GitHub Copilot.
- CI/CD know-how—familiar with pipelines enforcing compliance, test automation at API/regression levels, and clusters scalable through wasms/lightweight debug agents.
Get help with your application
Your very own career expert that helps elevate your application to the next level.
People Leadership – There’s No Excess
- Explicit choice to lead people while still actively contributing code and standards.
- Skilled hands-on coach: Calibrate feedback with formational moments, not gatekeeping critiques.
- Experience building an ascendance pipeline—players bring their own respect, you translate it into step-by-step problem-solving identities.
- Elevated EQ & ethical judgment when addressing performance gaps constructively and bearing responsibility for the grind.
Delivery & Convection
- Operate inside Scrum/Kanban, managing risk and delivering timelines with some margin.
- Scalable synthesis: Widen angles on cross-team blockers then turn them into concise, actionable feedback loops.
- Respected open-door communicator, versed in clarifying spoofed ambiguity between sprints, standups and innate risk-influencing action points.
Your Company: BackBase
"The AI-native Banking OS, combining operational momentum with natural curiosity."
About BackBase
- Each day, 150+ banks run on BackBase—ensuring cross-channel consistency for 1+ billion account holders from a shared truth.
- Anti-common-age: No forced-choice legacy migrations; domain-width language systems roll out as war stories, one thread at a time.
- Engineers ingenious for a woodland of 2,000—with a 50% R&D cohort. Consider flash—or work for the making of a Bot Half-List.
Values Manifestos
- Elegant Resilience: Our code is assessment-guilt free; our people thrive after trunking an acceptable day.
- Open-Api Corps: You’ll build venues where factions can check mid-res, share histories or march toward yet-unmeasured horizons.
BackBase® is positioned in Banking OS, an aide to build 1-Swiss army supporting 0-1 speak across reason and hasty rapport:intentions.
“It took my CV and asked me questions relevant to understanding what kind of jobs to suggest for me. Suggestions were almost perfect. Jobs were exactly what I’ve been looking for.”
Jessica, London
Skills
Location