API Lead (NodeJS & ExpressJS)
Atlanta, GA
Photon is seeking an experienced API Lead to design, develop, and lead the delivery of scalable, cloud-native APIs and backend services for large-scale digital commerce, loyalty, and customer engagement platforms within the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) domain.
This role focuses on building high-performance APIs, event-driven systems, and microservices using Node.js, NestJS, and Express.js. The ideal candidate will have strong experience in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, API governance, and leading engineering teams in delivering resilient and scalable solutions across web and mobile platforms.
Key Responsibilities
API & Backend Leadership
- Lead the design, development, and delivery of enterprise-grade APIs using NestJS and Express.js.
- Define and enforce API standards, best practices, versioning strategies, and governance models.
- Architect scalable and reusable backend services supporting digital ordering, loyalty, identity, payments, and customer engagement platforms.
- Mentor and guide development teams through code reviews, technical design discussions, and architecture reviews.
- Collaborate with architects and product teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
Microservices & Event-Driven Architecture
- Design and implement microservices-based architectures for high-volume, customer-facing applications.
- Build and maintain event-driven systems using messaging, pub-sub, and asynchronous communication patterns.
- Define strategies for event modeling, service orchestration, and distributed transaction management.
- Ensure services support resiliency patterns including retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, and fault tolerance.
- Drive architecture decisions related to scalability, performance, and system reliability.
Cloud-Native Engineering
- Design and deploy cloud-native applications on Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Leverage cloud services for compute, messaging, API management, storage, and monitoring.
- Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployments.
- Ensure backend systems meet enterprise standards for security, availability, scalability, and compliance.
Data & Integration
- Design and implement efficient data models for transactional and event-driven workloads.
- Work with both SQL and NoSQL databases to support high-throughput applications.
- Integrate with internal and external platforms through REST APIs, event streams, and third-party services.
- Optimize data access patterns and service interactions for performance and reliability.
Quality, Security & Observability
- Establish engineering best practices for testing, code quality, and deployment readiness.
- Implement logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting strategies for production systems.
- Ensure secure API design through authentication, authorization, encryption, and industry-standard security practices.
- Drive adoption of observability and operational excellence across backend services.
Collaboration & Delivery
- Lead technical planning, estimation, and execution in Agile environments.
- Collaborate with product owners, architects, frontend teams, QA, and platform engineering teams.
- Support technical roadmaps and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives.
- Act as a technical leader for backend and API engineering efforts across multiple projects.
Required Qualifications
- 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong backend development expertise.
- 3+ years of experience leading API and backend engineering teams.
- Strong hands-on experience with Node.js, NestJS, and Express.js.
- Proven experience designing and implementing Microservices Architecture.
- Strong experience building and supporting Event-Driven Architectures.
- Deep understanding of REST API design, API security, and API lifecycle management.
- Experience with asynchronous processing, messaging systems, and distributed system patterns.
- Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases.
- Hands-on experience with at least one major cloud platform: Azure, AWS, or Google Cloud Platform.
- Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and Agile development methodologies.
- Strong understanding of scalability, resiliency, and performance optimization techniques.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience in QSR, Retail, Hospitality, E-commerce, or Consumer Digital platforms.
- Experience with Kafka, RabbitMQ, Azure Service Bus, AWS SNS/SQS, EventBridge, or similar messaging platforms.
- Experience with Kubernetes, Docker, and container orchestration platforms.
- Familiarity with API Gateway solutions and API management platforms.
- Knowledge of OAuth2, JWT, OpenID Connect, and enterprise authentication patterns.
- Experience with Terraform or other Infrastructure as Code tools.
- Exposure to loyalty, customer engagement, identity, and payment platforms.
- Strong communication, stakeholder management, and technical leadership skills.
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