Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Team Lead (Node.js / AWS)

Description We are looking for Backend & Cloud Infrastructure Team Lead (Node.js / AWS). You'll lead the team that owns Questar's AWS cloud infrastructure and the backend microservices running on it. Hands-on leadership: roughly 60% people management, 40% staying close to architecture. You're accountable for how our microservices are designed, deployed, scaled and kept alive in production. What You'll Do: • Lead, mentor and grow a team of backend and infrastructure engineers: 1:1s, goals, performance reviews, career development • Own the architecture of the AWS environment and the microservices platform on it, from design through rollout • Break large initiatives into workstreams, delegate ownership, hold the team to delivery commitments without micromanaging • Run agile ceremonies (sprint planning, retros, grooming) and align roadmap and priorities with product and other engineering leads • Set and enforce engineering standards: code review, testing, observability, incident response, on-call rotation • Drive cost, performance and reliability improvements across the platform • Take part in hiring: interviewing, calibration, onboarding Requirements Must-Have: • 8+ years of industry experience • 5+ years as a people manager / team lead, leading engineering teams through full delivery cycles • 3+ years of production backend development in TypeScript / Node.js (APIs, services, background processing, data flows). Frontend or frontend-leaning full-stack does not count • Proven experience designing and leading AWS solutions at scale for distributed microservices — able to walk through a system you architected end to end and defend the trade-offs • Deep hands-on knowledge of core AWS: ECS/EKS, Lambda, RDS, DynamoDB, SQS/SNS/EventBridge, API Gateway, VPC networking, IAM • Containers and orchestration: Docker, Kubernetes or ECS • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform, CDK or CloudFormation) and CI/CD pipeline ownership • Production ownership: monitoring, alerting, on-call, post-incident reviews • Strong grounding in agile, and the judgment to know when to bend it • Excellent written and spoken English Nice-to-Have: • Kafka / event-driven architecture at scale • Multi-region or multi-account AWS setups • Database performance tuning at scale (Postgres, DynamoDB) • Security and compliance exposure (SOC 2, ISO 27001)