Node JS API Lead

We hope you are good! We are hiring API Lead to join our Digital Engineering team. Who are we? For the past 20 years, we have powered many Digital Experiences for the Fortune 500. Since 1999, we have grown from a few people to more than 4000 team members across the globe that are engaged in various Digital Modernization. For a brief 1 minute video about us, you can check Job Title: Lead API Dev Job Location: Atlanta, GA Job Type: FTE/Contract Job Summary: Photon is seeking an experienced API Lead to design, develop, and lead the delivery of scalable, cloud-native APIs and backend services for large-scale digital commerce, loyalty, and customer engagement platforms within the Quick Service Restaurant (QSR) domain. This role focuses on building high-performance APIs, event-driven systems, and microservices using Node.js, NestJS, and Express.js . The ideal candidate will have strong experience in distributed systems, cloud-native architectures, API governance, and leading engineering teams in delivering resilient and scalable solutions across web and mobile platforms. What will you do? API & Backend Leadership Lead the design, development, and delivery of enterprise‑grade APIs using NestJS and Express.js . Define and enforce API standards, best practices, versioning strategies, and governance models. Architect scalable and reusable backend services supporting digital ordering, loyalty, identity, payments, and customer engagement platforms. Mentor and guide development teams through code reviews, technical design discussions, and architecture reviews. Collaborate with architects and product teams to translate business requirements into scalable technical solutions. Design and implement microservices‑based architectures for high‑volume, customer‑facing applications. Build and maintain event‑driven systems using messaging, pub‑sub, and asynchronous communication patterns. Define strategies for event modeling, service orchestration, and distributed transaction management. Ensure services support resiliency patterns including retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, and fault tolerance. Drive architecture decisions related to scalability, performance, and system reliability. Design and deploy cloud‑native applications on Azure, AWS, or GCP . Leverage cloud services for compute, messaging, API management, storage, and monitoring. Partner with DevOps and SRE teams to implement Infrastructure as Code (IaC), CI/CD pipelines, and automated deployments. Ensure backend systems meet enterprise standards for security, availability, scalability, and compliance. Data & Integration Design and implement efficient data models for transactional and event‑driven workloads. Work with both SQL and NoSQL databases to support high‑throughput applications. Integrate with internal and external platforms through REST APIs, event streams, and third‑party services. Optimize data access patterns and service interactions for performance and reliability. Quality, Security & Observability Establish engineering best practices for testing, code quality, and deployment readiness. Implement logging, monitoring, tracing, and alerting strategies for production systems. Ensure secure API design through authentication, authorization, encryption, and industry‑standard security practices. Drive adoption of observability and operational excellence across backend services. Lead technical planning, estimation, and execution in Agile environments. Collaborate with product owners, architects, frontend teams, QA, and platform engineering teams. Support technical roadmaps and contribute to continuous improvement initiatives. Act as a technical leader for backend and API engineering efforts across multiple projects. What are we looking for? 8+ years of software engineering experience with strong backend development expertise. 3+ years of experience leading API and backend engineering teams. Strong hands‑on experience with Node.js, NestJS, and Express.js . Proven experience designing and implementing Microservices Architecture . Strong experience building and supporting Event-Driven Architectures . Deep understanding of REST API design, API security, and API lifecycle management. Experience with asynchronous processing, messaging systems, and distributed system patterns. Strong knowledge of SQL and NoSQL databases. Hands‑on experience with at least one major cloud platform: Azure, AWS, or GCP . Experience with CI/CD pipelines, Git workflows, and Agile development methodologies. Strong understanding of scalability, resiliency, and performance optimization techniques #J-18808-Ljbffr Photon