Lead Backend Engineer, Service Standards

Brief info about Vinted Our mission is to make second-hand the first choice, and we're looking for people who want to help us get there. Every day, we work together to help our members buy and sell pre-loved clothing and lifestyle items, giving each piece a second life – or even a third. The Vinted Group is made up of three business units that support this mission: Vinted Marketplace is Europe’s leading platform for second-hand fashion and a go-to destination for all kinds of pre-loved items, with a growing range of categories. Our platform connects millions of members across 20+ markets, helping great items find a new life. Vinted Go enhances the shipping experience with a vast network of over 500,000 pick-up and drop-off points, partnering with more than 60 carriers across Europe, with added services like item verification for peace of mind on high-value pieces. Vinted Pay is the newest part of the Vinted Group, dedicated to bringing secure, reliable payments to buyers and sellers across Europe. Seamlessly integrated into the Vinted app, it helps keep every transaction safe, efficient, and easy for our members. Founded in 2008 in Lithuania, Vinted began as a way for friends to find new homes for clothes they no longer needed. In 2019, we became Lithuania's first unicorn! Today, our headquarters remain in Vilnius, and we've grown with offices across Europe, supported by a team of over 2,000 people. Information about the position As a Lead Backend Engineer in the Service Standards team, you will shape how services are built, deployed, and operated across all of Vinted. You will work closely with a team on the development of our core service framework—providing engineering teams with golden paths, robust service contracts, standardized tooling, and performance benchmarks to ensure high reliability and developer velocity at scale. You will sit in the Service Standards team, part of the Service Ecosystem domain, reporting to the Engineering Manager of that team. The Service Standards team is responsible for standardizing service startup, consumer APIs, and foundational backend frameworks across Vinted's engineering landscape. Within it, this is a senior individual-contributor role combining technical leadership with high autonomy—you will define architectural directions, establish best practices, and guide engineers across domains without requiring full management overhead. You will collaborate closely with platform, observability, and product engineering teams to ensure our service framework and standards seamlessly integrate into daily workflows. Your work will directly impact developer experience, platform reliability, and system performance as Vinted continues to scale. In this position, you’ll • Lead the technical direction and design around service standards and golden paths. • Define and evolve company-wide service standards, including consumer APIs, service contracts, startup routines, and performance guidelines. • Build reusable backend libraries, tools, and scaffolding to streamline new service creation and maintenance. • Partner with backend engineers across domains to drive adoption of framework updates and gather continuous feedback. • Evaluate pragmatic trade-offs between architectural consistency, delivery speed, and technical debt across the platform. • Collaborate with Observability and Infrastructure teams to integrate telemetry, SLOs, and resilience practices into standard service templates. • Ensure security, privacy, and compliance guidelines are embedded directly into service contracts and framework templates. • Mentor senior backend engineers, participate in architectural design reviews, and foster high engineering standards across teams. • Drive architectural proposals (RFCs/ADRs) for platf