Lead Back-end Engineer

About Elockers

Elockers runs the smart-locker platform that festivals, venues, and events across six countries rely on for real time payments and marketplace-style payouts - including on-sale moments where a large share of a site's lockers can sell out within a minute. We're live in six countries, with further international expansion and two acquisitions underway.

Our platform is genuinely strong: microservices architecture (~30 services), event-driven data flow, and a payments stack built for a real marketplace. This isn't a role about fixing something broken - it's about taking technical ownership of a platform that already works well, and pushing it further.

The Role

We're looking for an exceptionally strong, hands-on Lead Engineer to take technical ownership of a platform where software, payments, and physical hardware come together. You'll match our current technical level and raise it - through your own hands-on work, and by making the people around you better. This is not a pure management role: you'll design architecture, write and review code, and solve genuinely hard problems yourself.

What you'll own

• Technical ownership of our microservices platform, with Node.js and modern architecture patterns at the core

• Cloud-native engineering on DigitalOcean App Platform - deployment, scaling, monitoring, and production reliability

• Reliability at peak: real-time payments and traffic spikes during live events, with zero tolerance for downtime

• Our Adyen-based payments and marketplace systems, and how our software connects to physical locks and hardware

• Spreading critical knowledge across the team so no single person is a single point of failure

• Setting the bar on engineering discipline - CI/CD, documentation, AI-assisted development - as we raise an already-strong platform further

• Being the clear, dependable bridge between commercial priorities and engineering delivery

What you'll bring

Deep, hands-on technical seniority - you independently design, build, and debug complex distributed systems

Strong, current Node.js and microservices expertise - a core requirement

Real soft skills and team fit - a clear communicator who makes the people around you better, not a lone operator

Genuine ownership and event mentality - you step up when something business-critical is on the line

Experience introducing engineering process and AI-assisted development in a fast-moving team

Cloud/platform engineering experience, ideally DigitalOcean App Platform

Payments or marketplace experience (Adyen, PSPs, split payments, KYC) and comfort with high-peak, mission-critical systems

A track record of coaching and knowledge transfer in a small team

IoT / hardware integration experience is a genuine plus - our software talks to physical lockers

Nice to have: product/business sense, React Native/Expo experience, multi-country scaling with GDPR awareness, background in events or ticketing.

Our stack today

Microservices (~30 services), moving toward Node.js at the core. Adyen for payments. Kafka, ClickHouse, Metabase for data. React Native/Expo for mobile. DigitalOcean, Sentry, New Relic, Jira for infra and tooling.

What we offer

• A competitive gross annual salary, depending on experience

• Real technical ownership of a platform where software, payments, and hardware genuinely come together

Sound like you? The most efficient way to apply is via Apply Here or through our website.