Lead Engineer_Tempe, AZ

Photon•Anthem, AZ

12d

About The Position

Photon is seeking a Lead Backend Engineer (Python) to drive the architecture, development, and delivery of scalable, cloud-native backend platforms for a large-scale e-commerce and loyalty ecosystem in the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) domain. This role combines hands-on engineering excellence with technical leadership, owning backend system design while mentoring teams and ensuring high-quality delivery across multiple workstreams. The Lead Backend Engineer will build and orchestrate high-performance APIs, event-driven microservices, and data transformation pipelines using Python (FastAPI) and AWS-native services. You will play a critical role in enabling digital ordering, loyalty, identity, and customer engagement journeys, working closely with product, architecture, DevOps, and frontend teams to deliver resilient, scalable, and business-aligned solutions. Experience with Paytronix or similar loyalty platforms and strong familiarity with QSR workflows is highly preferred.

Requirements

8-12 years of backend engineering experience, with strong hands-on development in Python.
Deep expertise in FastAPI, REST API design, and asynchronous programming (async/await).
Proven experience designing and leading event-driven architectures (pub-sub, queues, streaming).
Strong understanding of data structures, data transformation, and high-performance backend design.
Hands-on experience building cloud-native microservices on AWS.
Experience owning or leading backend architecture for distributed systems at scale.
Solid understanding of e-commerce platforms, digital funnels, loyalty programs, identity workflows, and customer journeys—preferably in QSR or retail.
Experience with Terraform, CI/CD pipelines, and modern DevOps practices.
Strong communication and leadership skills, with experience working in cross-functional Agile teams.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience with Paytronix or similar enterprise loyalty platforms.
Experience in QSR, retail, hospitality, or large-scale consumer digital platforms.
Exposure to Kafka, RabbitMQ, or AWS MSK.
Experience with feature flags, canary deployments, and blue-green releas
Knowledge of OAuth2, JWT, identity federation, and API security best practices

Responsibilities

Own the backend architecture for e-commerce, loyalty, and digital engagement platforms in the QSR domain.
Lead the design and development of cloud-native, stateless microservices using Python (FastAPI).
Define and enforce engineering standards, best practices, and design patterns across backend teams.
Design hub-and-spoke orchestration services to abstract integrations across loyalty, identity, CMS, payments, and commerce systems.
Architect and implement event-driven systems using asynchronous programming, pub-sub patterns, message queues, and streaming platforms.
Lead event processing and data transformation workflows, ensuring efficient handling of high-volume, real-time customer and transaction data.
Apply strong data structure and algorithmic fundamentals to optimize system performance, latency, and scalability.
Design resilient systems with idempotency, retries, DLQs, and graceful degradation strategies.
Lead the design and implementation of database solutions across SQL and NoSQL technologies based on workload characteristics.
Design, optimize, and govern relational databases (SQL) for transactional and reporting use cases.
Architect implement NoSQL data models using cloud-native databases such as Amazon DynamoDB and Azure Cosmos DB, ensuring scalability and low-latency access.
Define best practices for data partitioning, indexing, caching, and consistency models in distributed databases.
Ensure data solutions support QSR-scale traffic, peak loads, and global availability requirement
Build and govern production-grade REST APIs with robust authentication, authorization, validation, and error handling.
Design and optimize API gateways, proxy layers, caching strategies, and traffic orchestration for high-throughput environments.
Ensure secure integration with identity providers, loyalty platforms (Paytronix preferred), payment systems, CMS, and commerce backends.
Lead backend solutions on AWS, leveraging services such as Lambda, ECS/EKS, API Gateway, DynamoDB, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Redis, and MSK/Kafka.
Drive Infrastructure as Code (IaC) using Terraform and support CI/CD pipelines with automated testing and progressive delivery.
Ensure production-grade observability using OpenTelemetry, centralized logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
Ensure backend solutions align with QSR operational needs, including ordering flows, checkout, payments, loyalty accrual/redemption, and customer engagement funnels.
Partner with product and business stakeholders to translate customer journeys and commerce workflows into scalable backend capabilities.
Mentor backend engineers through code reviews, design sessions, and technical coaching.
Act as a technical leader and escalation point for backend systems across programs.
Collaborate closely with architects, product owners, QA, DevOps, and frontend teams in an Agile delivery model.