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.
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!
Diversity and Inclusion
We celebrate diversity and want you to bring your whole self to work.
Supporting an incredible community of tens of millions of users, we thrive on engaging as many views as possible to improve our platform. We see no reason why our culture should be any different.