Engineering Tech Lead Node.js Architect

Job Description

Role: Engineering Tech Lead Node.js ArchitectLocation: Sheffield, UKContract (3 days a week Onsite)Job Description

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Experience

1015+ years of software development experience with at least 5+ years of hands-on expertise in Node.js and experience leading engineering teams and large-scale backend platforms.

Job Summary:

We are seeking a highly skilled Engineering Tech Lead Node.js to lead the design, development, and evolution of scalable, high-performance backend systems. The ideal candidate should possess deep technical expertise in the Node.js ecosystem, strong architectural and system design capabilities, and proven experience leading engineering teams through complex technical challenges.

This role requires a hands-on leader who can drive technical strategy, mentor engineers, establish engineering best practices, and architect distributed systems capable of handling enterprise-scale workloads.

Key Responsibilities

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• Lead the architecture, design, and development of mission-critical backend applications using Node.js.

Design scalable, secure, and highly available distributed systems and microservices.

Drive technical decision-making and define engineering standards across projects.

Collaborate with Product Managers, Architects, DevOps, QA, and cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality solutions.

Review code, enforce best practices, and ensure maintainability and performance of applications.

Mentor and guide engineering teams through technical challenges and career development.

Optimize application performance, scalability, reliability, and observability.

Design APIs and integration patterns for internal and external systems.

Establish CI/CD pipelines and promote DevSecOps practices.

Lead technical discussions on architecture, system trade-offs, and technology adoption.

Ensure applications meet security, compliance, and data privacy standards.

Participate in production support, incident management, and root cause analysis for critical issues.

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Required Technical Skills

Node.js Expertise

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• Strong expertise in Node.js runtime internals and asynchronous programming.

Deep understanding of:

• 
  
• Event Loop

libuv

Worker Threads

Cluster module

Streams

Buffers

Memory management

Garbage collection

Advanced knowledge of JavaScript (ES6+) and TypeScript.

Experience with backend frameworks such as:

• 
  
• Express.js

NestJS

Fastify

Koa

Architecture & System Design

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• Strong understanding of software architecture principles and design patterns.

Experience designing:

• 
  
• Microservices architecture

Event-driven systems

Domain-driven design (DDD)

Hexagonal/Clean Architecture

CQRS

Saga pattern

API Gateway patterns

Experience building systems with high throughput and low latency.

Knowledge of scalability patterns including horizontal scaling, load balancing, and auto-scaling.

API & Integration

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• RESTful API design

GraphQL

gRPC

WebSockets

OpenAPI/Swagger

API versioning strategies

Third-party system integrations

Databases

Experience with both SQL and NoSQL databases:

• 
  
• PostgreSQL

MySQL

MongoDB

Redis

Elasticsearch

Strong understanding of:

• 
  
• Data modeling

Indexing

Query optimization

Transactions

Replication

Sharding

Messaging & Distributed Systems

Hands-on experience with messaging platforms such as:

• 
  
• Apache Kafka

RabbitMQ

AWS SQS/SNS

NATS

Understanding of:

• 
  
• Event sourcing

Idempotency

Retry strategies

Dead-letter queues

Eventual consistency

Cloud & DevOps

Experience with cloud platforms:

• 
  
• AWS

Azure

Google Cloud Platform

Hands-on knowledge of:

• 
  
• Docker

Kubernetes

Helm

Terraform

CI/CD pipelines

Infrastructure as Code

Observability & Performance

Experience implementing:

• 
  
• Centralized logging

Distributed tracing

Metrics collection

Monitoring dashboards

Knowledge of tools such as:

• 
  
• Prometheus

Grafana

OpenTelemetry

ELK Stack

Ability to identify and resolve performance bottlenecks in Node.js applications.

Security

Strong understanding of:

• 
  
• OAuth 2.0

OpenID Connect (OIDC)

JWT authentication

RBAC/ABAC

OWASP Top 10

Secure API development

Secrets management

Encryption best practices

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Leadership Expectations

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• Lead and mentor engineering teams.

Conduct technical design reviews and code reviews.

Define engineering standards and best practices.

Drive architecture discussions and technology decisions.

Collaborate effectively with stakeholders across business and technology functions.

Foster a culture of quality, innovation, and continuous improvement.

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Preferred Qualifications

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• Bachelors or Masters degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field.

Experience building large-scale enterprise or SaaS platforms.

Familiarity with serverless architectures and cloud-native development.

Exposure to AI/ML integrations or event streaming platforms is a plus.

Contributions to open-source projects or active participation in the Node. xwwtmva js community are desirable.