Backend - Associate Technical Architect /Lead

Job Description

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer with strong expertise in TypeScript, Node.js, GraphQL, AWS, and Kubernetes to design, develop, and maintain scalable, high-performance microservices supporting consumer-facing applications.

The ideal candidate will have hands-on experience building GraphQL APIs using Apollo Server/Federation, modernizing legacy applications, integrating third-party services, and managing production workloads on AWS EKS.

Roles & Responsibilities

Responsibilities

• GraphQL subgraphs: Design, build and own Apollo Federation subgraphs for realtor.com consumer experiences such as home search, listing and property details, saved homes and leads. They plug into a company-wide supergraph used by web and mobile apps.
• Modernization: Move legacy services onto TypeScript microservices and federated GraphQL without changing behaviour. Use data-compare testing and feature-flagged rollouts.
• Integrations: Connect with listing and property-data providers, geo and location services, identity (Auth0), messaging platforms and lead partners. Build in strong validation, retries and idempotency.
• Data and caching: Model and tune relational data access, including read/write splits. Use Redis/Valkey for caching and rate limiting so high-traffic consumer experiences and marketing campaigns stay fast and resilient.
• Async workflows: Build event-driven and background processing with Kafka and job schedulers.
• Production ownership: Run services on Kubernetes (K8s) on AWS EKS using the platform team's paved paths: Docker images, CircleCI builds, Helm charts and ArgoCD GitOps deployments. Own K8s Deployments, Services, ConfigMaps/Secrets, Ingress, liveness/readiness probes, resource requests/limits, PodDisruptionBudgets and HPA/KEDA autoscaling. Monitor with New Relic and Splunk, join the on-call and incident rotation, and keep quality gates green.

Must have

• 5+ years of backend engineering, including 3+ years of TypeScript/Node.js in production.
• Strong GraphQL experience (Apollo Server; Federation preferred), schema design, DataLoader and avoiding N+1 queries.
• Hands-on Kubernetes (K8s) experience running production services on AWS EKS: Docker, Deployments, Services, Ingress, ConfigMaps/Secrets, probes, resource limits and autoscaling (HPA).
• Comfortable debugging in K8s with kubectl: pod logs, restarts, OOMKills, rollouts and rollbacks.
• Experience with Helm charts and GitOps deployment (ArgoCD or similar) through CI/CD pipelines (CircleCI or similar).
• Strong SQL: MySQL or similar relational databases, query tuning, transactions, primary/replica patterns.
• Hands-on caching experience with Redis or Valkey: key design, TTLs, cache stampede and failure handling.
• REST and third-party API integration; JWT/OAuth; secure handling of PII.
• Testing discipline (Jest or similar) and CI/CD experience.
• Able to debug distributed systems under production load.

Good to have

• Experience modernizing legacy services (e.g. Java) into microservices.
• Kafka or other event streaming; event-driven autoscaling with KEDA.
• Real-estate, marketplace or lead-generation domain experience.
• Exposure to AI/LLM integrations or ML-powered features (search, recommendations).
• Data platforms and pipelines (Snowflake, dbt, Airflow).
• AWS Lambda/serverless; infrastructure as code with Terraform or CloudFormation.
• New Relic or other APM, distributed tracing, SonarCloud.
• API gateways (Tyk or similar), Traefik ingress, ExternalDNS.
• Experience working on an internal developer platform / paved-path model (shared Helm library charts, service templates, self-service deployments).
• Splunk log analysis; dependency automation with Renovate; Artifactory.
• Experimentation and analytics tooling (Amplitude, Optimizely).