Head of Backend Development

Job Description

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!