Staff Engineer / BE Team Leader (Core payroll)

The Backend Engineering Lead manages an offshore development team responsible for Mercans HR Blizz payroll platform and related services. This role combines people leadership, architecture, delivery, and hands-on engineering to build secure, scalable, and reliable backend systems.

Key Responsibilities
Team Leadership
Lead backend engineers and ensure successful project delivery.
Mentor developers and promote technical knowledge sharing.
Conduct technical interviews and support hiring decisions.
Plan team capacity and align work with business priorities.
Establish accountability for quality, estimates, and delivery.
Software Engineering
Design scalable, secure, and highly available backend services.
Write clean, maintainable code for APIs, applications, integrations, and cloud infrastructure.
Oversee HR Blizz integrations with client systems.
Establish architecture, coding, testing, and deployment standards.
Validate quality through unit, integration, and end-to-end testing.
Identify performance bottlenecks and automate repetitive processes.
Lead technical discovery, solution design, estimation, and code reviews.
Collaboration and Documentation
Partner with Product, QA, DevOps, and business teams to translate requirements into practical solutions.
Participate in architecture discussions and continuous-improvement initiatives.
Maintain technical documentation, process diagrams, integration guidance, and operational procedures.
Requirements
Bachelors or masters degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent experience.
At least five years of backend development experience.
Two or more years leading a team of at least four engineers.
Three or more years designing microservice solutions.
Four or more years working with Kotlin, Java/Spring, MySQL, MongoDB, or similar technologies.
Strong experience with APIs, SQL, event-driven architecture, and RabbitMQ or similar queues.
Experience with AWS, Azure, or Google Cloud.
Knowledge of Docker, containerization, CI/CD, automated testing, and test-driven development.
Strong analytical, problem-solving, communication, and documentation skills.
Fluent written and spoken English.
Practical experience using AI tools to improve engineering efficiency and decision-making.
Preferred Skills
Kubernetes and container orchestration.
Monitoring and alerting tools.
Automation experience in payroll, HR, or finance.
Performance Goals
Document and standardize deployment and migration procedures, including rules, responsibilities, and diagrams.
Create a single source of truth for Task Runner initiation and execution flows across all services.
Deliver a proof of concept using the free version of SonarQube or a similar static-analysis tool, including basic quality gates.
Ensure each participating engineer, including the Team Lead, completes at least two code reviews per sprint.
Keep tasks reopened in the acceptance environment below 20% per sprint through testing, reviews, and static analysis.
Keep tasks reopened after production release below 15% per sprint.
Ensure actual delivery time does not exceed the original estimate by more than 1.6 times through stronger discovery and planning.
Create and execute a Task Runner optimization plan that makes report generation and period closure at least twice as fast.