Engineering Lead - Backend

Overview

Engineering Lead, Backend – Dubai

The Role

• You’ll lead a delivery team in our new Dubai office — backend and mobile developers, a product manager, and QAs working as one unit, with backend engineers as your direct reports.
• You’ll own roadmap execution and technical quality, partner day to day with product management, and be the engineering voice in every cross-department conversation in the room.
• This is a hands-on leadership role, not a hands-off one.
• We expect you to set the technical bar, grow the engineers who report to you, and stay close enough to the code to keep the technical thread — while owning delivery the rest of the business can rely on.
• What You’ll Do in Your First 6 Months
• **Build out the Dubai delivery team.** Bring backend, mobile, PM, and QA together into one predictable delivery unit, with your backend engineer(s) as direct reports — and a clear plan to grow the team.
• **Own roadmap execution.** Turn the roadmap into shipped releases on a cadence the rest of the business can plan around.
• **Raise technical quality.** Set the bar for architecture, code review, and reliability across the backend — measured, not asserted.
• **Develop your people.** Grow the engineers who report to you through clear expectations, structured 1:1s, and real feedback.
• **Be the engineering voice in the room.** Make engineering an active, decisive voice in every cross-department discussion in Dubai.
• **Drive AI initiatives.** Lead how the Dubai team adopts AI — in the product and in how the team works day to day.

What We’re Looking For

• We’re hiring a technical leader who still ships — strong on the engineering craft and genuinely energised by leading people and delivery.
• Both halves matter equally.
• Technical depth (must-haves)
• Proficiency in Java.
• Experience with MVC frameworks such as Spring Boot.
• Experience with microservices architecture, and a solid grasp of MVC and RESTful services.
• Strong knowledge of relational and NoSQL databases.
• Hands-on experience with CI/CD pipelines and containerization.
• AWS knowledge.
• A real habit of using AI tools to solve problems and improve how the team works.
• Still hands-on — you lead delivery and you still code where it counts.

Leadership & Delivery (Must-Haves)

• You’ve managed engineers — owned a team’s delivery cadence and been accountable for what shipped.
• Evidence of growing engineers: setting expectations, running structured 1:1s, giving honest feedback, handling performance.
• You can turn a roadmap into predictable releases and communicate trade-offs clearly to product and leadership.
• Genuinely energised by the delivery and people side of engineering management — not only the technical side.
• Strong communication skills and stakeholder management— you represent engineering clearly to product, peer leads, and the leadership team, and keep stakeholders aligned.

Nice-To-Haves

• Experience building or scaling an engineering team in a fast-growing or startup environment.
• Background in consumer apps, marketplaces, or service platforms.
• Experience standing up an engineering presence in a new office or market.

Our Stack

• **Language & frameworks:** Java and PHP; Spring Boot and other MVC frameworks.
• **Architecture:** Microservices, MVC, and RESTful services.
• **Data:** Relational and NoSQL databases.
• **Infrastructure:** AWS, CI/CD pipelines, and containerization.
• **AI:** AI tooling built into how we solve problems and improve our processes.

What It’s Like Here

Why Justlife, Why Now