Lead Backend Developer

Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

We’re looking for a Lead Software Engineer to join our team in a backend developer role. This is a hands-on technical leadership role for someone who thrives at the intersection of big-picture architecture and heads-down implementation. You’ll help shape the technical direction for a critical platform capability while also staying close to the details: designing systems, writing code, reviewing implementation, mentoring engineers, and unblocking the team on complex technical problems.

You’ll work on challenging problems involving high impact coordination with 3rd party vendors, data integration, creating reliable, observable and stable services, and laying scaffolding for new services and features. The systems you help build will be used to underlie almost every message sent out of our systems.

What You’ll Do

• Shape the Architecture: Help define the technical vision, system boundaries, and architecture for services owned by the team you join.
• Lead by Example: Be a hands‑on technical leader who contributes directly to high-impact work through design, implementation, code review, debugging, and production support.
• Help build new features: Design and implement patterns that make it easy to add new features.
• Mentor & Guide Engineers: Provide day‑to‑day technical guidance, unblock engineers, review designs and code, and help raise the technical bar for the team.
• Plan & Deliver: Partner with the Engineering Manager and Product to turn ambiguous goals into clear technical plans, milestones, and incremental delivery paths.
• Partner Across the Platform: Collaborate closely with partner engineering teams to ensure that we integrate cleanly with the work other teams are doing.
• Drive Operational Excellence: Ensure that integration services operate reliably at scale as they set up, schedule and monitor messages in the 3rd party partner systems. Use observability, metrics, traces, logs, alerts, and postmortems to continuously improve system quality.
• Influence Technical Direction Broadly: Represent the integrations team in architecture discussions and help create alignment around technical patterns, dependencies, and platform interfaces.

What You Bring

• 7+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong track record of building and operating backend or platform systems in production (we use Python and other programming languages).
• Significant experience designing and operating distributed services.
• Strong architectural judgment around stateful services, asynchronous processing, system reliability, and production operations.
• Hands‑on technical leadership experience: you are comfortable being the go‑to person for unblocking, reviewing, mentoring, and leading complex technical initiatives end‑to‑end.
• Experience translating ambiguous product goals into pragmatic technical designs and incremental execution plans.
• Familiarity with building 3rd party integrations and the complexities and challenges associated with them.
• Strong understanding of how to use things like retries, idempotency, backoffs, rate limiting, handling partial failures, and external monitoring to keep a service running smoothly even if dependent services are experiencing issues.
• Experience building scalable backend services in cloud environments, preferably Google Cloud Platform.
• A strong focus on operational excellence — building reliable systems with monitoring, alerting, logging, tracing, incident response, and shared ownership of on‑call responsibilities for business‑critical services.
• Clear communication skills and the ability to translate technical tradeoffs into practical decisions with Product, Design, engineering partners, and business stakeholders.
• A collaborative, product‑minded approach to platform engineering — balancing technical quality with customer value and delivery momentum.

Why This Role Matters

Backend work might not be as visible to end users, but none of the magic of MovableInk would be possible without it. From the sending out of messages to the ingestion and processing of various types of data the backend teams at MovableInk play a pivotal role in ensuring the ongoing success of the DaVinci product and the many clients that rely on it for their marketing messages.

The base pay range for this position is $147,300-$192,000/year, which can include additional bonus depending on the position ultimately offered, in addition to a full range of medical, financial, and/or other benefits. The base pay offered may vary depending on job‑related knowledge, skills, and experience.

Studies have shown that women, communities of color, and historically underrepresented people are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification. We are committed to building a diverse and inclusive culture where all Inkers can thrive. If you’re excited about the role but don’t meet all of the abovementioned qualifications, we encourage you to apply. Our differences bring a breadth of knowledge and perspectives that makes us collectively stronger.

We welcome and employ people regardless of race, color, gender identity or expression, religion, genetic information, parental or pregnancy status, national origin, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital status, ethnicity, family or marital status, physical and mental ability, political affiliation, disability, Veteran status, or other protected characteristics. We are proud to be an equal opportunity employer.

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