Head of Backend Development
Location: Remote, but within the UK.
Salary: £100,000 - £110,000
Please note: We are unable to sponsor international visas at this time.
About Nexus Mods
Established in 2001, Nexus Mods is the largest video game modding platform on the internet - a household name in the PC gaming ecosystem.
- 71M+ registered members
- 800K+ mods for 4,000+ games
- 21B+ mod downloads
We’re currently focused on product modernisation, driving growth and building infrastructure for the next 10 years of community-powered modding.
Our Role
We’re looking for a Head of Backend Development to lead the technical direction, architecture, and people behind the platform powering Nexus Mods.
This role is both strategic and hands-on. You will own the backend vision, set engineering standards, unblock teams quickly, and build a fast, pragmatic engineering culture. You will help scale a platform that handles billions of downloads, millions of gamers, and the data and install pipelines behind the Nexus Mods Desktop App.
This is a key leadership role reporting into the Technical Director.
Responsibilities:
Technical Strategy & Architecture
- Own the backend architecture: APIs, data models, pipelines, and service boundaries.
- Drive our backend-first approach: push complexity into the backend, keep clients thin.
- Champion monolith-first architecture and avoid service sprawl unless scale demands it.
- Set standards for API design, consistency, testing, observability, and developer experience.
- Guide critical decisions around metadata, mod manifests, dependency modelling, and install reliability for the Desktop App.
Leadership & Team Growth
- Lead and mentor backend engineers across pods (Ruby/Rails, PHP and platform services).
- Create clarity through standards, expectations, architectural guardrails.
- Level up the team through coaching, technical guidance, and structured growth paths.
- Build a culture of ownership, pragmatism, collaboration and psychological safety.
- Promote the doctrines: simplicity, problem-first thinking, documentation discipline, and quality.
Delivery & Execution
- Ensure backend teams ship value weekly with predictable, fast delivery.
- Unblock engineers quickly bias to action over committee paralysis.
- Manage cross-team dependencies and escalate blockers early.
- Balance short-term delivery with long-term platform health.
Platform Stability & Scale
- Own uptime, performance, and resilience across mission-critical systems.
- Partner with SRE/Infra to improve CI/CD, monitoring, logging and incident response.
- Ensure systems can scale to millions of users and billions of downloads.
- Lead root-cause analysis and build a culture of calm, transparent incident handling.
Requirements
- Proven experience in a senior engineering leadership or management role, within backend development, with recent years leading teams or technical groups.
- Deep expertise with Ruby and Ruby on Rails in high-traffic environments.
- Strong background in building and scaling large web applications and APIs.
- Experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred).
- Strong understanding of system design, distributed systems, caching, queues, job processing.
- Strong architectural instincts: monolith-first, avoid service sprawl, pragmatic decisions.
- Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) and modern DevOps tooling.
- Excellent communicator who can reduce complexity and create alignment across teams.
- Calm, structured leadership during production issues and high-pressure moments.
Bonus Skills
- Experience working on creator platforms, content distribution, or gaming products.
- Familiarity with modding ecosystems, dependency graphs, file pipelines, or game tooling.
- Experience building APIs consumed by Electron/.NET desktop apps.
- Experience modernising legacy systems while maintaining delivery (“Strangler pattern”).
Benefits
- We work a 4-day week of 32 hours, with no reduction in pay.
- An allowance of £25 each month to spend on video games.
- Employee Assistance Programme.
- Private BUPA healthcare for you and your family.
- A very flexible training budget.
- Regular social events throughout the year. Participation is optional!
Originally posted on Himalayas