Lead Backend Developer, Distributed Systems (Remote)

About the role

Movable Ink scales content personalization for marketers through data-activated content generation and AI decisioning. The world’s most innovative brands rely on Movable Ink to maximize revenue, simplify workflow and boost marketing agility. Headquartered in New York City with close to 600 employees, Movable Ink serves its global client base with operations throughout North America, Central America, Europe, Australia, and Japan.

Movable Ink is standing up a new Orchestration team to build the next-generation AI decisioning layer that coordinates every message a brand sends across email, mobile, and other channels. We are looking for a Lead Engineer to set the technical direction for this platform, partner closely with the team's Engineering Manager and senior technical stakeholders to shape its architecture, and lead the hands-on design and implementation of the system from prototype to production. This is a deeply technical, high-ownership role at the intersection of distributed systems and machine learning, with high executive visibility and the opportunity to shape one of the most strategic engineering investments at the company.

This role will be reporting to the Engineering Manager of the Orchestration team.

Responsibilities:

- Set the Technical Direction: lead the architecture, design, and critical implementation decisions that take the orchestration platform from prototype to production

- Build the Platform: design and build a scalable, event-driven, fault-tolerant distributed system that processes high-volume real-time messaging decisions across workflows and channels

- Own Key System Components End-to-End: from architecture and implementation through deployment, monitoring, and incident response

- Drive Hard Technical Decisions: conduct design reviews, resolve architectural tradeoffs, and hold the team to high standards for system design, code quality, testing, and operational rigor

- Partner Across the Platform: collaborate closely with Product, Machine Learning, Data Platform, and adjacent engineering teams to translate complex requirements into clear technical designs with realistic paths to production

- Drive Operational Excellence: ensure the platform operates reliably at scale through strong observability, metrics, incident response practices, and shared on-call responsibilities for business-critical services

- Mentor and Model: serve as the senior technical voice on the team, mentoring engineers and modeling strong engineering practices

Qualifications:

- 7+ years of software engineering experience with a focus on distributed systems

- Deep experience designing, building, and operating large-scale distributed systems that are fault tolerant, highly available, and highly concurrent

- Strong systems thinking, with sound architectural judgment around event-driven, stateful, real-time decisioning systems

- Skill at building complex systems: identifying core primitives, making sound architectural choices under uncertainty, and adapting designs as requirements evolve