Lead Backend Engineer

Job description

**🚀 Why Midnite?** Midnite is a next-generation sports betting and gaming platform built for a new wave of players. We combine sharp product thinking, bold brand, and fast execution to create experiences that feel modern, intuitive, and built for how people actually play today. Over 400,000 players have already made the move, and we’re only just getting started. We’re a high-performance team operating at pace. High ownership. Constant iteration. No hiding behind processes. We move quickly, test relentlessly, and turn ambitious ideas into real impact. If you’re driven, creative, and thrive in fast-moving environments where you can shape meaningful outcomes - keep reading. Not your grandad’s bookie. **👀 The Role** **Title:** Lead Backend Engineer **Team:** Platform Engineering **Location:** Remote / Australia We’re looking for a Lead Backend Engineer to help evolve the systems that power Midnite as we scale across markets and regions. This is a senior individual contributor role for someone who enjoys working close to the core of a product platform: understanding how systems fit together, improving boundaries and reliability, and building the technical foundations that help teams move faster and safer. You’ll work across backend and platform systems, partnering closely with the Australia team and the wider global Platform group. You will not just be building product features; you’ll be working on the systems underneath them: service boundaries, data separation, interfaces, reliability, deployment, and scalability. This role suits someone who can take high-level direction, work independently through ambiguity, and drive complex technical projects forward without needing every detail defined upfront. **Technical 💻** Our platform is primarily built in Python and hosted on AWS, incorporating Flask/FastAPI, Pytest, Mypy, Docker, PostgreSQL, SQS/Kafka, S3, and Terraform. We deploy daily. As a Lead Platform Engineer, you will: - Design, build, and improve backend and platform systems that support Midnite’s core product. - Work on complex platform problems across scalability, reliability, service isolation, and regional readiness. - Help define clean boundaries and interfaces across existing services and data flows. - Contribute to systems that support multi-region and future market expansion. - Improve observability, deployment practices, performance, and operational maturity. - Work across app-layer systems and platform foundations, with support from the team on deeper infrastructure areas where needed. - Contribute production code, reviews, and technical design as part of day-to-day delivery. - Help identify failure points, reduce risk, and make the platform more resilient as usage grows. **Collaboration & Ownership 🤝** You’ll collaborate with engineers across Australia, the UK, and Canada, so strong async communication and ownership are essential. In this role, you will: - Take high-level technical direction and independently drive work through to delivery. - Partner with Clayton, Leon, and the wider Platform team on architecture and implementation decisions. - Work with product engineering teams where platform changes touch existing product systems. - Communicate clearly across time zones, raising risks and blockers early. - Help create a high-ownership engineering culture in the Australia team. - Bring pragmatic judgement to technical trade-offs, balancing speed, reliability, and maintainability. We care deeply about developer productivity and efficiency, so we use tools that support that: Linear, Notion, Slack, and a modern Mac-based setup. **The next Midniter:** - Strong Lead-level backend or platform engineering experience. - Experience independently delivering complex technical projects. - Strong backend capability in Python or a comparable modern language such as Go, Rust, Java, or Scala. - Comfortable learning new languages and systems quickly. - Strong understanding of distributed systems, scalability, and architecture trade-offs. - Experience with microservices, service boundaries, eventual consistency, data separation, or reliability engineering. - Comfortable working across app-layer systems as well as platform / infrastructure concerns. - Strong communication skills and the ability to work effectively across time zones. - High ownership, strong judgement, and comfort operating in ambiguity. **💰 Winnings:** - Join us at an exciting stage as we establish our presence in Australia. We're investing in a great local employee experience and will continue to expand our benefits package as we grow. - Flexible working and a fully supported home office setup so you can do your best work from home. At Midnite, we’re committed to creating equal opportunities for everyone. We actively strive to build balanced teams that reflect the diversity of our communities, including ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, the LGBTQIA+ community, and all genders. We aim to provide an inclusive and supportive interview experience for all candidates. If you require any reasonable adjustments, please let us know in advance so we can ensure you feel comfortable and set up for success.