Lead Back-End Engineer

About BeatStars

Founded in 2008, BeatStars is the world’s leading music creator platform, powering over 10 million creators across 192 countries. Through its marketplace, publishing, and studio tools, BeatStars helps producers, songwriters, and artists build sustainable careers as music entrepreneurs. The company is pioneering a responsible approach to assistive AI that protects creators’ rights while unlocking new creative possibilities.

Now, with over 10 million monthly active users, we've paid over $450M to our creator community. We continue to support independent musicians with the tools, community, opportunities, and education they need to earn a living doing what they love.

What You’ll Be Doing

We’re looking for a Lead Back-End Engineer to help define the technical standard for our Backend practice while continuing to ship production-grade software.

You’ll be more than an individual contributor. You’ll be a technical standard-bearer.

This role exists to elevate our engineering quality, reduce tech debt, and ensure we’re building products in robust, reliable, and rapid ways. You’ll help shape how we architect, build, review, and ship code across the Backend.

Within your first quarter, you’ll be writing production code, defining standards, and helping the team execute with greater clarity and confidence.

Responsibilities:

• Serve as the technical lead for the Backend practice.
• Actively design, write, review, and ship production code — this is a hands-on leadership role.
• Define and document engineering standards, patterns, and best practices for your domain.
• Ensure code quality, scalability, and maintainability across the stack.
• Partner closely with Product to translate PRDs into clear technical execution plans.
• Audit existing systems and proactively identify opportunities to reduce tech debt.
• Write production-ready code regularly — this is a hands-on leadership role.
• Establish processes for enforcing standards through code reviews, CI/CD, and documentation.
• Collaborate with cross-functional stakeholders to ship features predictably and reliably.
• Technical mentor to  3–5 engineers 

What You’ll Need

• 5+ years at a company where you’ve shipped and supported production applications  and systems serving large-scale user bases (hundreds of thousands to millions of users)
• Strong full-stack capabilities with deep passion and expertise in backend (BE) systems, APIs, and infrastructure
• Strong backend engineering experience with proficiency in Go (Golang) and a track record of building production-grade systems (5+ years preferred)
• Experience with object-oriented languages such as Java or C# is also valued (bonus)
• Deep familiarity with AWS, including services like ECS, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS, and overall cloud architecture.
• Experience building and working with GraphQL APIs, particularly in high-scale applications.
• Experience working on scalable, production-grade applications.
• Strong architectural instincts and understanding of system design.
• Proven ability to write clean, maintainable, high-quality code.
• Excellent communication skills — able to clearly explain technical decisions to both engineers and product partners.
• Experience collaborating daily with Product teams.
• A bachelor’s degree in Computer Science or a related field is preferred (Master’s or higher is a plus).

You’ll also have access to the full engineering toolset (AWS, GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, etc.) and be expected to deploy code like any other member of the team.

This role might be for you if:

• You’re comfortable using modern tools, including AI, to improve your productivity and output
• You care deeply about engineering standards and hate “just ship it” chaos.
• You’ve seen what good architecture looks like — and what happens when it’s missing.
• You enjoy setting direction and raising the bar for others.
• You’re comfortable being both hands-on and strategic.
• You want to help build a high-performance engineering culture from the inside.
• You move quickly, but you don’t sacrifice quality.
• You believe Product & Engineering should operate as a tightly coupled unit.

Benefits

We're a small and growing team working together closely and operating with complete autonomy and freedom. This means you will have a direct impact on any project that you work on, and your success will be felt across the company. Some other perks include:

• Elite Tier Benefits Program - generous contributions towards medical, dental, and vision for employees and dependents
• 401(k) Matching
• FSA/HSA
• 20 PTO days (+5 Days at 4 years tenure) and routine sick days
• 10 Company Observed Holidays + 2 Floating Holidays
• 8 weeks of parental leave paid at 100%
• Company-sponsored Short Term Disability and Basic Life Insurance
• Voluntary Benefits (LTD, Additional Life, and 401k)
• Flexible work hours
• $70/month tech reimbursement
• $30/month wellness reimbursement
• Virtual social events and a sense of community (even online)
• Global Recognition and Anniversary Program
• Plenty of opportunities while we grow and scale in a global environment
• Access to On-Demand Learning Platform

Our general global core working hours are 10 am-2 pm EST Monday through Friday. While we generally have the flexibility to build an 8-hour workday, we ask for flexibility during core hours, as from time to time, it may be needed to attend global calls that cover more than 2 time zones during these hours. We ask folks to schedule events when possible, at least 3 working days in advance.

Compensation:

This salary/OTE range represents the low, middle, and high end of the salary or OTE (Sales roles only) range for this position, and is subject to change. To determine starting pay, we carefully consider a variety of factors, including primary work location and an evaluation of a candidate’s skills, experience, market demands, and internal parity. The range shared on JDs is a broad range to cover multiple regions. Candidates will be given a specific range based on their city/country during the initial phone screen. 

Salary/OTE is just one component of our total rewards package. All regular employees are also eligible for additional benefits and perks that BeatStars has to offer.

Remote US salary range for this role is $192,000-$248,500. 

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