Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Team Lead, Node.js, AWS

• Lead, mentor, and grow a team of backend and infrastructure engineers through 1:1s, goal setting, performance reviews, and career development
• Own AWS environment and microservices platform architecture from design through rollout
• Break large initiatives into workstreams, delegate ownership, and maintain delivery commitments
• Run agile ceremonies including sprint planning, retrospectives, and grooming
• Align roadmap and priorities with product and other engineering leads
• Set and enforce standards for code review, testing, observability, incident response, and on-call rotation
• Drive cost, performance, and reliability improvements across the platform
• Participate in hiring through interviewing, calibration, and onboarding
• Lead the team owning Questar's AWS cloud infrastructure and backend microservices
• Stay hands-on with architecture while managing approximately 60% people leadership and 40% architecture

• 8+ years of industry experience
• 5+ years as a people manager / team lead, leading engineering teams through full delivery cycles
• 3+ years of production backend development in TypeScript / Node.js (APIs, services, background processing, data flows); frontend or frontend-leaning full-stack does not count
• Proven experience designing and leading AWS solutions at scale for distributed microservices, including the ability to explain an end-to-end architecture and defend trade-offs
• Deep hands-on knowledge of ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, API Gateway, VPC networking, and IAM
• Experience with Docker and Kubernetes or ECS
• Experience with Infrastructure as Code using Terraform, CDK, or CloudFormation
• CI/CD pipeline ownership
• Production ownership including monitoring, alerting, on-call, and post-incident reviews
• Strong grounding in agile and judgment about when to bend it
• Excellent written and spoken English
• Nice-to-have: Kafka / event-driven architecture at scale
• Nice-to-have: Multi-region or multi-account AWS setups
• Nice-to-have: Database performance tuning at scale with Postgres or DynamoDB
• Nice-to-have: Security and compliance exposure, including SOC 2 or ISO 27001