Head of Backend Department

Aristek Systems is actively involved in the development of innovative IT solutions for the US and European markets. Our team consists of over 170 highly qualified professionals of various IT-spheres.

Now we are looking for Head of Backend Department to join our team!

NB! There is an opportunity to work remotely.

Your Responsibilities at Aristek Systems

Department Management
– Planning & Goal Setting: Defining objectives, developing action plans, setting priorities, and establishing timelines.
– Operations & Workflow Organization: Structuring and refining workflows, delegating tasks, and adjusting priorities in real time.
– Control & Performance Monitoring: Ensuring standard compliance, evaluating process efficiency, monitoring productivity, and managing documentation and reporting.
– Team Motivation & Engagement: Identifying individual motivators, providing feedback and guidance, monitoring engagement, preventing burnout, and implementing financial and non-financial incentives.
– Coordination & Conflict Resolution: Driving internal and cross-functional collaboration, facilitating communication, and resolving conflicts.

Resource & Capacity Management
– 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. The delivery owner sets final team requirements.
– Escalate unresolved “project vs. people” resource conflicts to C-level and Heads level.

People Management & Talent Development
– 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.

Goal Setting & OKR
– 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.

Department Economics
– 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.

Service Line / Offer Development
– 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.

Cross-company Efficiency & Process Development
– 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.

Required Skills and Experience

Management Experience & Scale
– 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).

Engineering Background
– 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.
– Database Management & Architecture: solid experience with relational (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and NoSQL databases, query optimization, indexing, and data modeling.
– System Design & Architecture: hands-on experience designing scalable, high-load, resilient microservices or distributed systems.
– VCS & Delivery: profound knowledge of Git/GitFlow and ability to manage complex codebases, code review standards, and API versioning.
– Engineering Standards: deep understanding of clean code practices, patterns (DDD, SOLID), security standards (OWASP), and automated testing.

Business & Client Exposure
– Presales experience: hands-on participation in presales activities, experience estimating projects at the presales stage (scoping, effort estimation, risk assessment for prospective clients).
– Stakeholder & Client Communication: ability to participate in architectural/client meetings, advocate for technical solutions, and articulate technical trade-offs to business stakeholders.

AI Adoption
– 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
– Cloud & DevOps / CI/CD: hands-on experience with AWS/GCP/Azure, Docker, Kubernetes, and setting up CI/CD pipelines.
– System Observability: experience with monitoring and tracing tools (Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, ELK stack).
– Basic Frontend Understanding: conceptual knowledge of FE frameworks (React, Angular, Vue) for effective cross-team integration.

Benefits you get with Aristek Systems

• 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.