Lead Backend Engineer, Service Standards

As a Lead Backend Engineer in the Service Standards team, you will shape how services are built, deployed, and operated across all of Vinted. You will work closely with a team on the development of our core service framework—providing engineering teams with golden paths, robust service contracts, standardized tooling, and performance benchmarks to ensure high reliability and developer velocity at scale. You will sit in the Service Standards team, part of the Service Ecosystem domain, reporting to the Engineering Manager of that team.

The Service Standards team is responsible for standardizing service startup, consumer APIs, and foundational backend frameworks across Vinted's engineering landscape. Within it, this is a senior individual-contributor role combining technical leadership with high autonomy—you will define architectural directions, establish best practices, and guide engineers across domains without requiring full management overhead.

You will collaborate closely with platform, observability, and product engineering teams to ensure our service framework and standards seamlessly integrate into daily workflows. Your work will directly impact developer experience, platform reliability, and system performance as Vinted continues to scale

In this position, you’ll

• Lead the technical direction and design around service standards and golden paths.
• Define and evolve company-wide service standards, including consumer APIs, service contracts, startup routines, and performance guidelines.
• Build reusable backend libraries, tools, and scaffolding to streamline new service creation and maintenance.
• Partner with backend engineers across domains to drive adoption of framework updates and gather continuous feedback.
• Evaluate pragmatic trade-offs between architectural consistency, delivery speed, and technical debt across the platform.
• Collaborate with Observability and Infrastructure teams to integrate telemetry, SLOs, and resilience practices into standard service templates.
• Ensure security, privacy, and compliance guidelines are embedded directly into service contracts and framework templates.
• Mentor senior backend engineers, participate in architectural design reviews, and foster high engineering standards across teams.
• Drive architectural proposals (RFCs/ADRs) for platform-wide backend standardization.

• Have deep backend engineering experience and strong architectural intuition, with proven success building scalable services and frameworks.
• Demonstrate a track record of driving cross-team technical alignment and leading complex initiatives across multiple engineering groups.
• Possess expert knowledge in designing API contracts, service startup patterns, and performance optimization.
• Understand trade-offs in platform design and know how to build golden paths that engineers love to use.
• Communicate technical vision and architectural choices clearly to both technical leads and engineering leadership.
• Enjoy mentoring engineers, conducting design reviews, and sharing best practices to level up the backend engineering community.

• 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