Lead Backend Engineer, Incident Management

When an incident happens in production at Vinted, how quickly our engineering teams recover directly affects millions of members across Europe and the US.

In this role, you will be the lead technical architect for VITA, our in house platform for alerts, on call routing, incident management, and SLOs. Every single production alert at Vinted flows through VITA, and every incident is coordinated through it in Slack, from declaration to postmortem.

You will join a focused engineering team within our Service Ecosystem domain. The previous lead engineer recently stepped up to become the team Engineering Manager, which means we now need an experienced technical partner to take over the architectural vision.

Because our team operates without a dedicated product manager, you will enjoy true product ownership. You will spend roughly half your time on technical discovery, researching solutions, and shaping our roadmap directly with engineering stakeholders and directors across Vinted.

In this position, you’ll

• Lead the team's technical direction: scope complex problems, design solutions and coordinate delivery across teams.
• Own incident management and on-call processes, and lead improvements to both the processes and the tooling.
• Eliminate alert fatigue across Vinted, collaborating with engineering teams to group noisy alerts, establish alert standards, and make every page actionable.
• Advance practical AI in production, designing the event pipelines that allow our AI incident agent to accurately suggest root causes during live outages in minutes.
• Define standards for SLOs and alerts across Vinted, and simplify the tools teams use to create them.
• Define and track the product and process metrics that show whether our work makes a difference.
• Keep alert routing and our other critical systems reliable and simple to operate, so the team can move faster.
• Act as a technical mentor and multiplier for a growing team of five engineers, elevating their engineering discipline through thoughtful system design reviews and collaborative RFCs.

• Proven experience architecting, building, and operating high scale distributed systems in production. Our platform is built in Go, but we warmly welcome strong backgrounds in Java, Rust, Python, C++, or similar technologies.
• Have experience owning distributed systems in production, from design to operation.
• Have been on call and responded to production incidents, and are happy to keep doing it.
• Strong product mindset for developer tooling. You treat other engineers as your customers, listen to user pain points, and measure success by adoption and developer happiness.
• Understand observability: metrics, logs, traces and SLOs.
• Excellent written and spoken English is mandatory, paired with strong technical communication and diplomacy. You can explain architectural risks clearly to non technical stakeholders and have the confidence to challenge senior leaders constructively with data and SLOs.
• Natural mentor and collaborator. You take pride in lifting others up, breaking down complex technical problems, and helping newer engineers grow safely.

Nice to have

• Advantage: experience with incident management, on-call or observability tooling, or in a platform team serving other engineers.
• Advantage: experience building LLM-based tools or agents.

• The opportunity to benefit from our share options programme
• 25 working days of holiday
• Access to all the tools & tech needed for work
• Home office support: we provide IT workstation equipment and a personal budget of up to 540 for home workplace furniture
• Private health insurance
• Pension plan with flexible contribution options and a matching contribution from Vinted
• Confidential Employee Assistance Program (EAP) for you and your family
• Frequent team-building events
• A personal monthly budget for shopping on Vinted
• A dog-friendly office
• In Vilnius office: Gym & in-house meals at friendly prices
• In Kaunas office: a monthly lunch allowance, and a once-a-week provided in-house lunch and breakfast