Head of Backend Department

Описание

Aristek Systems is an international IT company that specializes in custom software development.

Responsibilities

• Defining objectives, developing action plans, setting priorities, and establishing timelines.
• Structuring and refining workflows, delegating tasks, and adjusting priorities in real time.
• Ensuring standard compliance, evaluating process efficiency, monitoring productivity, and managing documentation and reporting.
• Identifying individual motivators, providing feedback and guidance, monitoring engagement, preventing burnout, and implementing financial and non-financial incentives.
• Driving internal and cross-functional collaboration, facilitating communication, and resolving conflicts.
• Act as Resource Manager for the department: allocate and reallocate engineers across projects, balancing project demand against people development and retention.
• Maintain target utilization of the department; forecast capacity gaps and surpluses and initiate hiring or reallocation accordingly.
• Provide staffing expertise for project and presales requests: team composition, seniority mix, ramp-up timelines.
• Escalate unresolved "project vs. people" resource conflicts to C-level and Heads level.
• Own hiring and dismissal decisions within the department, including participation in interviews for key positions.
• Run performance reviews, PDP, and career development processes in the department; personally own development roadmaps for Team Managers.
• Build the succession pipeline for key positions; identify and retain key people.
• Grow the technical competencies of the department required by current and prospective projects, presales, and new service offers.
• Act as the primary information channel to C-level on the state of the department and of the projects where its engineers are involved.
• Participate in defining and cascading company-level OKRs.
• Define the department’s OKRs in line with company objectives, involving the team in their formulation.
• Track OKR progress and report the department’s results to C-level on a regular basis.
• Own the financial efficiency of the department: monitor profitability of engineers on projects together with the commercial owner for each client.
• Monitor salary levels within the department against the market; initiate and justify revisions.
• Manage the department budget for training, tooling and licenses.
• Participate in company-level financial and business decisions, working with financial information.
• Track market shifts and emerging technology trends to identify where the company has a realistic chance to build strong, differentiated expertise.
• Translate the company’s technical expertise into market-relevant service offers, together with other Heads and c-level.
• Identify and prioritize new capabilities worth investing in and developing within engineering teams.
• Initiate and drive the development of new capabilities inside engineering teams, beyond maintaining the existing backend practice.
• Aggregate expertise from different practices (backend and others) into coherent, packaged service offers.
• Validate new service offers technically and commercially through presales involvement and client feedback.
• Iterate on, evolve, or sunset service offers based on market response and delivery results.
• Collaborate with other Heads as part of the leadership/heads team to improve overall company efficiency, not just backend practice performance.
• Design, discuss, and drive the implementation of new organizational processes that extend beyond the backend department.
• Take ownership of introducing and embedding these processes across teams, ensuring adoption beyond one’s own function.

Requirements

• Work experience in an outsourcing/service company with 200+ employees in a management position (50+ subordinates).
• 5+ years of experience in Engineering Management / Team Leadership (Head of BE, Engineering Manager, Lead Backend Engineer).
• 10+ years of experience in Backend Engineering (hands-on technical background).
• Strong knowledge of the core Backend stack: at least one major ecosystem (e.g., Node.js, Python, Java, Go, C#, or PHP) and HTTP/REST, gRPC, WebSockets.
• Solid experience with relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases, query optimization, indexing, and data modeling.
• Hands-on experience designing scalable, high-load, resilient microservices or distributed systems.
• Profound knowledge of Git/GitFlow and ability to manage complex codebases, code review standards, and API versioning.
• Deep understanding of clean code practices, patterns (DDD, SOLID), security standards (OWASP), and automated testing.
• Hands-on participation in presales activities, experience estimating projects at the presales stage (scoping, effort estimation, risk assessment for prospective clients).
• Ability to participate in architectural/client meetings, advocate for technical solutions, and articulate technical trade-offs to business stakeholders.
• Experience integrating AI into SDLC and other engineering/organizational processes — not just AI-assisted coding, but AI adoption across the delivery lifecycle.

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, and setting up CI/CD pipelines.
• Experience with monitoring and tracing tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
• Conceptual knowledge of FE frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) for effective cross-team integration.

We offer

• Ability to work fully remote.
• 20 paid days per calendar year for vacation.
• 3 paid days per calendar year, allowing temporary absence of an employee for medical reasons without sick leave.
• Partial payment for medical insurance.
• Partial payment for a monthly gym membership card.
• Payment of 50% of the cost of a partner service for learning English.
• English Paired Classes with a certified teacher.
• English Speaking Club with a certified teacher.
• Team buildings, corporate parties and other extracurricular events.
• Gifts in case of important events in your life (birthday/wedding/the birth of a child).
• Partial payment of advanced trainings, conferences and educational courses.
• 50% payment of Spotify Premium.
• Pay 50% of the cost of the affiliate service, which gives access to more than 250,000 books.
• Partial compensation for a laptop purchase.
• Referral program.
• Knowledge base.
• Inhouse learning and development manager.