Backend Lead

About Vulcan Labs

At Vulcan Labs, we build and scale AI-powered consumer products for global markets.Founded
in Vietnam in 2017, Vulcan has grown into a global consumer technology company with 200M+
downloads across a diverse portfolio of mobile and AI products. One of our flagship products,
Chat Smith, is an AI-powered productivity app that has reached 65M+ users globally, reflecting
our ability to build, scale, and compete in global markets.

Role Summary

We are looking for a Backend Lead to own backend engineering across all Vulcan Labs products. You will set the technical direction for our Go-based backend and AI infrastructure on GCP, lead and grow the backend team, and make sure product teams build on shared platforms instead of reinventing infrastructure. This is a hands-on leadership role: you design and review systems, unblock engineers, and still write code where it matters.

You report to the Head of Engineering and work directly with Product Owners, Design, Data, and the other Tech Leads (iOS, Android, FrontEnd, AI, QA/QC)

What will you do?

Technical leadership

• Own the architecture and roadmap of backend systems serving Chat Smith (our flagship product), the Mobile App Portfolio.
• Drive platform thinking: consolidate shared services (auth, billing/credits, LLM gateway, memory/context, observability) so teams ship faster with less duplication.
• Design and scale LLM-backed services: model routing, streaming, caching, rate limiting, cost control, and safety guardrails across multiple providers (Vertex AI/Gemini, OpenAI, Anthropic).
• Build the eval and observability foundation (Langfuse or equivalent) so AI features move from demo quality to production quality with measurable regressions.
• Set and enforce engineering standards: system design reviews, code review, testing, CI/CD, and incident response.
• Own reliability, security, and cost of backend workloads on GCP, including IAM hygiene, secret management, and keyless service architecture.

Team leadership

• Hire, onboard, mentor, and grow backend engineers (10-12 members); run performance and career development for the team.
• Set clear goals aligned with product outcomes (Revenue, Retention, Quality, User Experiences), not just delivery.
• Work in a shared-backlog model with PO, Engineering, and Design; translate product bets into technical plans and trade-offs.
• Build a culture of ownership, data-driven decisions, and honest technical debate aligned with Vulcan core values.

• 8+ years in backend engineering, including 3+ years leading engineers (tech lead or
  engineering manager).
• Expert in Golang; strong in system design, distributed systems, and API design at
  consumer scale (tens of millions of users).
• Production experience with GCP (GKE/Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, Cloud SQL, BigQuery,
  IAM) or equivalent; solid CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code fundamentals.
• Strong database skills across SQL and NoSQL: schema design, query optimization, and
  data modeling for high-traffic products.
• Hands-on experience shipping LLM-powered features or agent systems to production,
  including cost, latency, and quality trade-offs.
• Comfortable with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) and event-driven
  architectures.
• Security mindset: threat modeling, least privilege, audit logging, and protection of user
  data.
• Demonstrated ability to hire, coach, and retain strong engineers.

• Grow Yourself: Work with young, talented teammates on global apps across a diverse portfolio and varying app sizes (Mainly in AI domain).
• Attractive Package: 13th-month salary, performance bonus.
• Healthy Culture: 12 days of annual leave and 5 days of sick leave, health-care insurance, annual health check, and a dedicated team-bonding budget.
• Well-equipped Facility: MacBook provided, with an additional monitor available if needed.
• Diverse Activities: Complimentary coffee, tea, and snacks; company trips; and quarterly happy-hour events.
• Innovative Environment: Flexible working hours, one remote day per month, seminars and internal sharing sessions, and a culture with no barriers to ideas.