Tech Lead — Backend & Platform

Location : Remote eligible, ability to travel to NYC 4–6 times/year required ABOUT BASTA Basta helps first-generation students turn college degrees into strong careers by transforming how they enter and advance in the workforce. Basta's flagship platform, Seekr, is powered by millions of data points from more than 70,000 first-generation career journeys and combines precision matching, personalized guidance, and structured pathways to help students secure strong first jobs. With a presence on 300+ campuses, Basta helps institutions scale career support while connecting employers to high-performing talent that traditional hiring systems often overlook. Basta advances economic mobility for first-generation students nationwide. THE OPPORTUNITY You've led engineering teams, maybe as a manager, maybe as a tech lead who ran the whole show, and you've watched AI change what one excellent engineer can do. Now you want your hands back on the keyboard, building end-to-end, owning architecture decisions instead of attending meetings about them. You know the why behind the how: you've designed systems, operated them in production, and mentored the people who came after you. You're not looking for a bigger team to manage. You're looking for a platform to own and a mission worth owning it for. ABOUT THE TECH LEAD ROLE You'll be the most senior permanent engineer at Basta, the technical anchor of our Seekr platform and the person our engineers, product team, and leadership trust with the decisions that matter most. This is a high-trust, high-ownership role: our platform serves thousands of first-generation college students, and you'll hold real responsibility for its architecture, reliability, and evolution. Own the architecture, end to end Design and evolve the backend and platform architecture, including APIs, data flows, distributed processing, AI/LLM integrations, and infrastructure, with durable choices that balance velocity today against maintainability at scale Make foundational technical decisions and own their consequences: you'll have the autonomy of a lead and the accountability that comes with it Partner with the CPTO on technical strategy and roadmap, translating ambiguous product direction into buildable systems Build and operate, hands-on Ship production code weekly across the stack (backend-weighted: Python/FastAPI, RDBMS Postgres, plus our Next.js/Celery frontend), integrating LLMs, embeddings, and agentic workflows i Own DevOps end to end including CI/CD, AWS cloud infrastructure, observability, and the operational discipline that keeps a small team's platform reliable without a dedicated SRE near term Use AI development tools to multiply your outcomes, and know exactly when not to trust them Technical Leadership Mentor our engineers through architecture reviews, pairing, and code review, and raising the bar by example Collaborate with Product Manager on project-management and product delivery to keep workstreams visible, scoped, and moving Model what senior engineering judgment looks like in an AI-native codebase: the why behind every how WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE In your first year, you've become the engineer everyone trusts with the hard calls. Specifically: You inherit and own the platform's backend architecture, cloud infrastructure, and technical decisions that used to require external senior contractors now happen in-house, faster You've shipped significant end-to-end features and measurably improved reliability, observability, or velocity Our engineers are visibly better because you're here through mentoring, reviews, and the standards you model The CPTO spends less time in tactical technical decisions and more on strategy, because you've earned that trust WHAT YOU BRING 8+ years building production software, with deep backend and platform experience. You've designed systems and lived with the consequences of your designs Experience leading, as an engineering manager, tech lead, or staff+ engineer, and a deliberate choice to be hands-on now You've operated real systems in production: deployments, incidents, monitoring, the unglamorous work that separates builders from prototypers Fluency with modern AI development, LLM APIs, embeddings, agentic tools, grounded in engineering fundamentals; AI makes you faster because you already know what good looks like Excellent communication skill and enough project management experience to run workstreams and explain technical tradeoffs to non-technical colleagues Excitement about Basta's mission and about building in a small, high-trust, high-autonomy environment. Lived experience of the students we serve a big plu