Lead Developer (Backstage)

Lead Developers act as the primary point of contact for our clients, ensuring that teams are successful in their delivery. In this role, you will bring a strategic mindset to projects and spend time collaborating and negotiating with clients to bring a technical vision to life. Having a balance of high-level and tactical mindsets is a must, as you will spend time both with clients and your teammates.

At Thoughtworks, we believe in going above and beyond the standard and are committed to delivering best-in-class solutions that exceed our clients' expectations. Our engineering and delivery practices reflect our commitment to quality, and our team is always looking to innovate and improve. Lead Developers guide and coach their teams in their implementation and application.

As part of our efforts around Backstage, we are providing professional services support to help open source adopters maximize their success. This includes enabling a high-impact customer success function to assist with setup, adoption, and long-term platform transformation. The goal is to help customers implement Backstage, integrate their systems, and realize business value through both technical execution and cultural change.

Job responsibilities

• Use continuous delivery practices to deliver high-quality software as well as value to end customers as early as possible.
• Work in collaborative, value-driven teams to build innovative customer experiences for our clients.
• Create large-scale distributed systems out of microservices.
• Efficiently utilize DevOps tools and practices to build and deploy software.
• Lead or take part in the entire cycle of software consulting and delivery from ideation to deployment and everything in between.
• Act as a mentor for less-experienced peers through both your technical knowledge and leadership skills.
• Support Backstage adopters with onboarding, catalog integration, and plugin customization.
• Help drive internal adoption of Backstage, increasing developer activity and improving software delivery metrics.
• Create reusable assets, contribute to implementation blueprints, and establish scalable customer onboarding processes.
• Troubleshoot customer issues, often with limited information, and contribute to ongoing product improvement through captured feedback.

Job qualifications

Technical Skills

• Proficiency with TypeScript, particularly helpful for working on Backstage plugins.
• Experience with Spotify Backstage.
• Familiarity with container deployment across cloud providers (e.g., AWS, Azure).
• Working knowledge of cloud infrastructure, including tuning relational databases.
• Ability to debug and troubleshoot complex issues with minimal context.
• Understanding of Kubernetes concepts (pod lifecycle, configuration, ingress/egress), even if not working with K8s directly.
• Comfortable writing high-quality, well-tested code using Object-Oriented programming principles.
• Active presence in the tech community through speaking, blogging, or open source contributions.
• Comfort with Agile methodologies such as XP, Scrum, or Kanban.

Professional Skills

• You enjoy influencing others and always advocate for technical excellence while being open to change when needed.
• You're resilient in ambiguous situations and can approach challenges from multiple perspectives.
• Strong communication and teamwork skills, dedicated to discovering the most suitable solutions for any given scenario.
• You genuinely enjoy interacting with teammates from across the business and have a knack for communicating technical concepts to non-technical audiences.

Other things to know

Learning & Development

There is no one-size-fits-all career path at Thoughtworks: however you want to develop your career is entirely up to you. But we also balance autonomy with the strength of our cultivation culture. This means your career is supported by interactive tools, numerous development programs and teammates who want to help you grow. We see value in helping each other be our best and that extends to empowering our employees in their career journeys.

About Thoughtworks

Thoughtworks is a dynamic and inclusive community of bright and supportive colleagues who are revolutionizing tech. As a leading technology consultancy, we’re pushing boundaries through our purposeful and impactful work. For 30+ years, we’ve delivered extraordinary impact together with our clients by helping them solve complex business problems with technology as the differentiator. Bring your brilliant expertise and commitment for continuous learning to Thoughtworks. Together, let’s be extraordinary.