Lead - Backend Engineering

About CargoX

CargoX is a UAE-based autonomous logistics company deploying driverless delivery vehicles across last-mile, middle-mile and long-haul routes. At the heart of our operations is CargoX's fleet orchestration platform: the critical infrastructure layer that coordinates real-world delivery flows across autonomous vans, bots and drones. It connects delivery partners, commercial operators and vehicle providers, and manages the full operational journey from order creation and dispatch through live vehicle state, customer handoff, incident recovery and data-driven reporting. With live operations underway, our next chapter is about hardening the platform, expanding to new partners and vehicle types, and scaling our technology to power the future of autonomous logistics.

Role overview

We are looking for a Lead – Backend Engineering to lead the backend of our fleet orchestration platform, including the API services that act as the primary interface for our commercial ecosystem. You will set technical direction, make the key architecture decisions, and lead and grow a team of backend engineers while staying hands-on in the code. We are looking for someone who combines ownership, technical pragmatism and a commitment to operational excellence, and who is comfortable leading through ambiguity.

What you will do

• Lead the team: lead, mentor and hire backend engineers; set engineering standards, run code and design reviews, and build a culture of ownership and reliability.
• Own the architecture: define the backend architecture and technical roadmap, and make sure the platform stays correct through retries, duplicate events, partial failures and unreliable external systems.
• Integrations and data: lead integrations with vehicle manufacturers, fleet platforms and delivery partners, turning inconsistent external APIs into dependable product capabilities through a unified abstraction layer; own data design across relational, geospatial and time-series workloads.
• Real-time systems: drive the roadmap for real-time data, resolving bottlenecks in high-frequency ingestion (MQTT/WebSockets) to deliver sub-second latency.
• Security, scalability and observability: set and enforce standards for platform security and observability, including multi-tenant architecture (RLS) and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Cross-functional leadership: work closely with customers, operators, Product and DevSecOps to understand what happens in the real world, and turn those insights into pragmatic product and engineering decisions.

What you will bring

• 8+ years of backend engineering experience, including at least 2 years leading engineers or owning the architecture of a production platform.
• Deep, practical experience with Java/Kotlin and Spring Boot, and strong distributed-systems fundamentals.
• A track record of building reliable, event-driven systems that handle failures, retries and idempotency correctly.
• Experience designing APIs and integrations with third-party platforms, and working with relational, geospatial and time-series data.
• Experience with real-time data (MQTT, WebSockets or similar), and with security and observability in multi-tenant systems.
• Strong problem-solving and communication skills; you enjoy working through hard architectural questions with your team at the whiteboard.
• Experience in logistics, mobility, fleet management or robotics is a strong plus.

Location: Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates (on-site)