Backbase
(RD) Engineering Team Lead (ETL)
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(RD) Engineering Team Lead (ETL)
Senior Engineering Squad Lead
Our ideal candidate is an experienced Engineer who thrives in both deep technical execution and people leadership—not just a manager who occasionally coded. If you debrace production issues, design scalable systems, mentor junior engineers, and deliver with predictability, this is your role.
You’re the captain of a squad—accountable for delivery quality, technical growth, and team scalability.
About the Role
You’ll spend:
- ~70% hands-on in the codebase (code reviews, debugging, system design)
- ~20% on architecture, quality, and cross-team execution
- ~10% on people: rotation and growth
Key traits: ✅ Technical at heart – still writes code, leads system design, and debugs under pressure ✅ People-first leadership – builds resilient teams with psychological safety ✅ Delivery owner – optimises flow, pushes back on unrealistic timelines with data
Further down the page, you’ll find your responsibilities, requirements, and how we work at BackBase.
Responsibilities
Technical Leadership & Execution (70% of role)
- Hands-on operations: Actively participate in code reviews, debug production bugs/outages, and unblock squad members (comfortable in an IDE or LLM-powered coding envs like Cursor/Code Claude).
- System design & architecture:
- Lead RFCs, design reviews, and scaling decisions (collaborating with Staff Engineers).
- Embed security, observability, and scalability from day zero.
- AI-native engineering:
- Champion agentic tooling and LLM workflows (e.g., code generation, test automation, AI-assisted debugging).
- Experiment with AI-driven productivity (e.g., faster releases, automated documentation).
- Production excellence:
- Champion CI/CD pipelines, test automation, and quality gates.
- Ensure releases are robust with minimal risk.
- Emergency triage:
- During critical incidents, either double down technically or lead the technical response under pressure.
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People Leadership (10% of role)
- 1:1s and growth: Regular coaching sessions, performance calibration, and evidence-based career growth plans (squad size: 6–9 engineers).
- Team health: Foster psychological safety, resolve friction early, and maintain a healthy sprint rhythm even under delivery pressure.
- Hiring & succession:
- Lead craft hiring (right skillset/seniority for the squad’s growth).
- Ensure knowledge continuity (handbooks, mentorship).
- Conflict resolution:
- Mediate interpersonal/cross-team issues proactively to protect team momentum.
Delivery & Stakeholder Focus (20% of role)
- Delivery mastery:
- Reduce cycle time via empirical measurements (e.g., cycle time tracking) and process tweaks.
- Proactively remove blockers before they cascade.
- Stakeholder partnership:
- Translate business needs into technical outcomes with Product Managers/Domain Architects.
- Push back on unrealistic requests using data, not guesswork.
- Continuous improvement:
- Drive team tooling upgrades, operating model efficiencies, and communication transparency.
Requirements
Technical Depth
✔ 5+ years of hands-on software engineering (recent, production-grade contributions) ✔ Deep expertise in one core tech area (e.g., backend, distributed systems) + T-shaped breadth ✔ Familiarity with:
- CI/CD pipelines
- Test automation (unit/integration/E2E)
- Observability (logs, metrics, tracing)
- Modern observability & ops (SLOs, chaos engineering) ✔ Enthusiasm for AI: Willingness to adopt AI tooling (e.g., LLM-based dev tools) and advocate for their use.
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Leadership & People Skills
✔ True about people: Desire to lead engineers while remaining hands-on ✔ High emotional intelligence: Thrives under pressure, gives constructive feedback, hears diverse perspectives ✔ Coaching mastery: Experience running effective 1:1s, mentoring, and calibration sessions ✔ Conflict management: Addresses tougher conversations with respect and clarity ✔ Culture building: Creates inclusive, high-performing engineering teams
Delivery & Pragmatism
✔ Agile expertise: Scrum/Kanban experience + managing delivery risk ✔ Unblocker mindset: Swiftly diagnoses, mitigates blockers, and escalates transparently ✔ Zero Ego: Adjusts communication style for engineers, PMs, and C-levels ✔ Track record of scaling: Built/improved teams, processes, and engineering orgs
About BackBase
Transforming fragmented banking operations into a smooth customer experience.
🔹 Mission: Our AI-native Banking OS lets banking teams operate seamlessly—from digital front-end to back-office support—with audit trails, consistency, and compounding capability. 🔹 Impact: Powered 150+ banks, 2,000+ employees globall, 50% in R&D (where we make progress). 🔹 Platform: Microsoft Azure-based, modular, no rip-and-replace migration.
We’ve been shipping for 20+ years, modernising retail, commercial, and private banking.
Note: If you both enjoy crafting code and building high-performing teams, this role is yours. We’ll never ask you to delegate the hard technical parts to someone else. Lead with purpose.
“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
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