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About Our Client

Our client is the Middle East's leading on-demand grocery delivery platform — connecting millions of customers with supermarkets, dark stores, and specialty retailers across the UAE and beyond. Their backend powers a complex, real-time operation: inventory availability, order lifecycle, logistics coordination, and third-party integrations that have to work in concert, at scale, every day.

The Role

We are looking for a Lead Backend Engineer who measures their impact not by how much they personally write but by how much gets built, reviewed, and shipped while they are thinking about the next architectural decision.

This is a pure IC role. No people management, no meetings for the sake of meetings. What you will have instead is deep ownership: of a Rails codebase evolving from a monolith into a well-decomposed system, of a suite of AI coding agents already in use at elGrocer that you will sharpen and extend, and of the craft of backend engineering at a level where architecture and delivery are inseparable.

You will work directly with our Staff Engineer, translating architectural direction into systems that are clean, robust, and built to outlast the sprint that created them.

What You'll Do

Backend Architecture & Engineering

• Own the design and delivery of complex backend systems within our Rails platform — from API contracts and data modeling to service decomposition and async patterns
• Lead the ongoing evolution of our monolith: identifying seams, proposing decomposition strategies, and executing incrementally without disrupting live operations
• Set the technical standard for backend code quality — through design, review, and the kind of feedback that makes engineers better
• Collaborate with the Staff Engineer on architectural decisions, bringing implementation-level insight that shapes strategy from the ground up
• Diagnose and resolve performance bottlenecks, scalability constraints, and systemic issues in a production system that does not sleep

AI Agent Orchestration & Productivity

• Take ownership of elGrocer's AI coding agent setup — Cursor, Claude, Copilot, and custom workflows already in use — and make them sharper, faster, and more deeply embedded in how we deliver software
• Build and refine agent workflows that handle the repeatable: boilerplate generation, test coverage, documentation, code review scaffolding — so human attention goes where it matters most
• Develop judgment around AI-generated output that the wider team can learn from: when to accept, when to push back, when to rewrite entirely
• Treat your agent setup as part of your engineering toolkit — something you tune continuously, not something you configure once
• Contribute to a culture where the question is not 'should we use AI here' but 'how do we use it well here'

What We're Looking For

Must Have

• 6–9 years of backend engineering experience, with meaningful time spent in Ruby on Rails production codebases
• Strong architectural instincts — you have designed systems, not just built features, and you can articulate why one approach ages better than another
• Hands-on experience working with or inside a monolith-to-services migration — you understand the pragmatism required to do this without breaking things
• Real, daily familiarity with AI coding tools — you have moved past novelty into workflow, and you have opinions about what works and what does not
• The ability to hold two things at once: shipping with urgency and building with care
• Clear written communication — your design docs, PR descriptions, and async messages are as considered as your code

Nice to Have

• Experience in e-commerce, marketplace, or on-demand delivery platforms
• Exposure to building or customizing AI agent pipelines beyond off-the-shelf tooling
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, background job patterns, and API design at scale

How We Think About This Role

There is a version of this job where you close twelve tickets a week and call it a good sprint. That is not the version we are hiring for.

We are hiring for the version where your agents handle the scaffolding, your architecture decisions reduce future tickets from ever being created, and your code review raises the floor of what the team considers acceptable. The output is not measured in lines — it is measured in what the system can do six months from now that it cannot do today.

If you have already started thinking about your AI tools as a junior engineer who needs direction, context, and the occasional correction — you will feel at home here.

Our Stack

Backend: Ruby on Rails (primary)

Infrastructure: Azure, Kubernetes

Data: PostgreSQL, Redis, event-driven patterns

AI Tooling: Cursor, Claude, Copilot, custom agent workflows (already in use)

Tooling: GitHub, CI/CD pipelines, observability stack

Why Us

• A codebase with real architectural problems worth solving — not greenfield abstraction, but production complexity that requires taste and judgment
• An AI tooling culture that is already moving — you are joining to lead it forward, not to convince anyone it is worth trying
• Direct line to architectural decision-making through a Staff Engineer who values implementation insight
• Remote-first, high-trust, async-friendly — your output matters more than your timezone
• A platform used by millions across the Middle East, where backend decisions have visible, real-world consequences

Benefits

• You will work with a great team
• Lots of learning opportunities and experience of a lifetime
• You will be part of a great culture
• Congenial atmosphere
• Excellent and market-competitive gross salary (depends upon experience, skillset, and interview). The salary is taxable (500k to 600k)
• Medical insurance
• Gratuity
• Annual leave
• Annual bonus
• Casual leave
• Sick leave
• Birthday leave
• Weekly team lunch
• Monthly team-building activities
• Paid training

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