Backend Team Lead (PHP/Node.js)

Delasport

Sofia, Bulgaria

About the Role:

We're hiring an Engineering Team Lead for one of the most consequential engineering teams at Delasport - the team that owns KYC, AML, anti-fraud, and regulatory compliance across the platform. These aren't peripheral services. They're what make it legally possible for our operators to take a bet in every market we're licensed in. Every player who signs up, every withdrawal, every suspicious pattern, every regulator report - it flows through systems your team owns. When a new jurisdiction comes online, your team is on the critical path. If you want a leadership role where the work is technically real, the stakes are visible, and the freedom is genuine - read on. This role is based in Sofia, Bulgaria, and we welcome candidates who are open to relocating (relocation support provided).

What Your Team Owns:

You'll manage a team of 5 full-stack developers and 2 QAs responsible for:

KYC - identity verification pipelines, document checks, and third-party provider integrations;
AML - transaction monitoring, sanctions and PEP screening, suspicious-activity detection;
Anti-Fraud - behavioural review and fraud-pattern detection across player activity;
Regulatory Compliance - jurisdiction-specific rules, reporting obligations, and operator configurations.

The footprint is a mix of synchronous APIs, scheduled jobs, and real-time stream consumers processing events off Kafka and RabbitMQ.

What You'll Actually Work On:

Shaping the future stack. Today the team works across PHP/Laravel, Python, and TypeScript/Vue. All new services will be written in Node.js, and you'll be a key voice in shaping how that evolution unfolds - patterns, shared libraries, deployment standards;
Driving technical excellence. Setting and raising the bar on performance, reliability, and operational maturity across the team's services;
Real ownership of production. The team owns its services end to end - design, build, ship, observe, fix. You set the standard for how that ownership is exercised;
Growing the team. Seniors ready to push toward staff-level work; mids ready to grow into seniors. Your impact on them will be one of the most rewarding parts of this role.

What You’ll Do:

Manage the team. Set technical direction, code-quality bar, and architectural standards. Run code reviews that teach. Develop the engineers under you;
Stay hands-on. This is not a pure people-management role. You'll write code, design systems, and pair on hard problems;
Architect for the real world. Design services that handle real-time event streams reliably, fail safely under regulatory scrutiny, and integrate cleanly with the third-party providers we depend on;
Drive the technical roadmap. Make and defend the calls on what to refactor, what to rewrite, and where to invest the team's time;
Partner across the org. Work closely with Product, DevOps, Data, and the Compliance/Legal side of the business - the last of which is unusual for an engineering role and one of the more interesting parts of the job.

Employees may be required to participate in an on-call rotation, ensuring availability outside regular working hours to handle urgent issues as needed as per the On-call policy.

Why This Role Is Different:

High business impact. When KYC breaks, players can't deposit. When AML breaks, we have a regulatory problem. The work matters and people know it;
Polyglot by design, not by accident. PHP, Python, TypeScript today; Node.js for everything new. If you're tired of being pigeonholed in one language, this team doesn't do that;
Genuine ownership. Your team owns its services end to end. No throwing things over the wall;
Regulated-domain depth. You'll learn how iGaming compliance actually works at the engineering level - a specialisation that's genuinely valuable and surprisingly rare on the market.

Who You Are:

Experience: 7+ years building backend systems in PHP, including 2+ years supervising a team or operating as a senior technical lead;
Core technical strength:
- Strong PHP and OOP fundamentals - design patterns, clean architecture, testability;
- Production experience with Laravel (or strong Symfony experience and the willingness to ramp on Laravel);
- Comfortable working with event-driven systems - Kafka, RabbitMQ, or equivalent. You've built and operated consumers, not just published a message once;
- Solid grasp of relational databases (MySQL/PostgreSQL) - schema design, query performance, the things that bite at scale;
- Working experience with NoSQL (MongoDB, Redis, Elasticsearch, or similar) - knowing when to reach for it and when not to;
- Comfortable with Docker, containerised deployments, and at least one cloud (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
Architecture sense: You can reason about scalability, fault tolerance, and failure modes - and explain trade-offs to people who don't share your background;
Mentoring: You menage by setting direction and raising the bar of those around you, not by managing tickets. Strong written and spoken English;
Mindset: Pragmatic, bias toward shipping, comfortable with ambiguity, genuinely interested in the business problem and not just the technical one.

Nice to Have:

Experience in iGaming, fintech, or any regulated domain (banking, payments, healthcare);
Hands-on experience with KYC/AML/fraud-prevention systems or vendor integrations;
Working knowledge of Python and/or Node.js;
Exposure to TypeScript/Vue or another modern frontend stack.