Senior Backend Developer - Engineering Manager (Hands-on)

Work Model: Remote

Job Type: Full-time

Experience: 5+ years (including team leadership experience)

Language: Russian (Required), English (B2+ Upper-Intermediate)

About Buzz AI

Buzz.ai is a rapidly scaling SaaS company in the Sales Engagement space. We’ve grown incredibly quickly to 1000+ clients and 40+ employees across our offices in Belgrade (Serbia), Saint Petersburg (Russia), and Toronto (Canada).

We are looking for a hybrid leader who can wear two hats: driving our core backend architecture as a senior developer while managing, mentoring, and organizing our engineering team to hit delivery goals. Because we move fast and keep our team lean, we heavily prioritize extreme development efficiency through modern AI-assisted engineering workflows.

What you’ll be working on:

• Team Leadership & Delivery: Manage a growing team of developers, conduct regular 1-on-1s, unblock technical hurdles, and align sprint goals with the product roadmap.
• Hands-on Development: Remain highly active in the codebase—developing, maintaining, and scaling core platform functionality and high-throughput backend services.
• AI-Driven Velocity: Lead by example in using AI tools to accelerate code generation, debugging, and system documentation to maintain an elite delivery pace.
• Architecture & Integrations: Design and build robust APIs and integrations with third-party services to collect, enrich, and optimize our extensive contact database.
• Process Optimization: Establish and refine development workflows, implement engineering best practices, oversee code reviews, and drive CI/CD improvements.

Your qualifications:

• 5+ years of commercial backend development experience, with deep, expert-level knowledge of Python.
• 1+ years of formal or informal experience leading engineering teams, managing delivery timelines, and mentoring developers.
• AI Tooling Mastery: Highly efficient and hands-on with next-gen AI development workflows and tools, specifically Cursor, Hermes, and Claude Code to maximize personal and team engineering velocity.
• Extensive experience designing, building, and optimizing scalable APIs using Flask or FastAPI.
• Production-grade understanding of system design, database architecture (SQL and NoSQL), and managing asynchronous tasks/message brokers (Celery, Redis, Kafka).
• Strong leadership characteristics: empathy, clear communication, a problem-solving mindset, and the ability to balance business requirements with technical debt.

Nice to have:

• Experience writing and scaling complex web scrapers and data extraction pipelines.
• Deep experience with CI/CD setups (GitLab CI / Jenkins) and infrastructure.
• Analytical database experience with ClickHouse.

We Offer:

• Fully remote work model with a low level of bureaucracy and micromanagement.
• Highly interesting, non-trivial scaling challenges and a direct opportunity to influence product strategy.
• A friendly, supportive, and international team environment.

Key skills:

Python · Flask / FastAPI · Cursor · Claude Code · Hermes · AI-Assisted Engineering · System Architecture · Engineering Management · Russian · English