Tech Lead, Backend

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Tech Lead, Backend - GraphAware Hume based in France.

This is a senior technical leadership role focused on the platform foundations of a graph-powered analytics product.
You’ll shape backend architecture and technical direction across capabilities used by multiple engineering teams.
The role combines hands-on development with deep expertise in graph databases, APIs, security, and scalable systems.
You’ll be the technical authority for graph architecture, continuously evaluating new technologies and opportunities to improve the platform.
You’ll work closely with engineers and Product Managers to turn product goals into robust, long-term technical roadmaps.
The environment is highly collaborative and remote-friendly, with significant autonomy and influence without formal people-management responsibilities.
Your work will help deliver intelligence systems that enable organizations to extract meaningful insights from complex connected data.

• Drive platform architecture and technical direction, owning the transversal foundations that feature teams build upon and influencing cross-cutting architectural decisions across the engineering organization.
• Own the graph technology strategy, continuously evaluating new releases, ecosystem tooling, and capabilities, while testing them against real workloads, anticipating breaking changes, and planning scalable migrations.
• Optimize graph performance and scalability by designing and refining Cypher queries, graph access patterns, data models, and database architecture for latency, throughput, and reliability.
• Lead backend engineering initiatives, building secure, modular, scalable APIs and platform services that provide intuitive access to complex graph-based data.
• Design secure access-control systems suitable for mission-critical environments, applying strong security principles throughout backend architecture and implementation.
• Orchestrate graph-powered workflows that automate analytics, inference, and real-time insight generation.
• Partner with Product Managers and engineering stakeholders to translate long-term product objectives into practical technical strategies, roadmaps, and architectural priorities.
• Provide technical mentorship and influence, raising engineering standards and helping teams make sound architectural decisions without relying on formal management authority.
• Drive consensus across teams for significant architectural changes, clearly communicating trade-offs, risks, and long-term implications.
• Anticipate platform-level challenges before they affect product teams, proactively identifying opportunities to improve reliability, scalability, maintainability, and developer experience.
• Contribute hands-on to development and delivery, applying modern engineering practices across design, implementation, testing, debugging, profiling, CI/CD, and deployment.
• Collaborate effectively in a distributed environment, using asynchronous communication and remote-working practices to maintain alignment across geographically dispersed teams.

Requirements:

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including work on large-scale, complex applications and collaboration across multiple technical and functional teams.
• Deep, hands-on Neo4j expertise, including advanced Cypher optimization, query profiling, graph access patterns, and familiarity with the broader ecosystem such as Graph Data Science (GDS), APOC, and Neo4j drivers.
• Strong graph data modelling experience, with the ability to model real-world domains using nodes, relationships, labels, and properties as core architectural concepts; relational database experience, such as PostgreSQL, is a plus.
• Proven technical leadership experience, including ownership of architecture and technical direction for a team, platform, or product area rather than simply contributing to decisions made by others.
• Strong Java or JVM expertise, with the ability to work confidently in a Java codebase and apply modern software engineering principles such as Clean Archit