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!