Backend Tech Lead

Description

Quantum Machines is a global leader in control systems for quantum computing, scaling from individual qubits to arrays of thousands.

We're looking for a hands-on Tech Lead to drive the technical direction of our core backend layer and lead the engineers building it. The systems you'll own handle bursty, high-throughput workloads: thousands of requests per second, strict latency requirements, distributed coordination, hard concurrency problems. You'll shape the architecture, review the designs, and still write the code.

What Makes This Role Different

Our backend team is the orchestration layer between:

• Hardware control systems (C++)
• Client-exposed SDK (Python)
• Reporting and management system (Go)
• Business logic (Java/Kotlin + Spring)

As Tech Lead, you're the technical anchor of that layer. When teams disagree on where a boundary belongs, you drive the decision. When a design has a flaw nobody's spotted, you catch it. When the hardest problem lands, you're close enough to the code to pick it up yourself.

Requirements

Requirements

• 8+ years building backend systems in Java/Kotlin, including experience leading the technical work of a team
• You still write code, and you're good at it - this is not a management-only role
• Deep concurrency expertise: race conditions, lock ordering, async patterns - and you can teach others to reason about them
• Architecture at system scale: throughput, distributed coordination, performance trade-offs
• Design review leadership: you can take apart a design constructively and propose one that will hold
• A track record of mentoring engineers who got better because of you
• You treat code quality as a system property, building the standards and culture that sustain it

Strong Plus

• Spring experience
• gRPC-based communication
• Python programming
• Experience in polyglot environments
• AI coding agent experience, with opinions on how a team should use them well
• Experience with real-time, low-latency, or hardware-adjacent systems

You'll Thrive Here If You

• Lead through reasoning, not title
• Ask questions when requirements are unclear, rather than guessing
• Know when to insist on "right" vs. "good enough to ship"
• Give direct, kind feedback
• Communicate clearly, including to non-backend audiences