Backend Engineer

We're looking for a Backend Engineer who has already shipped production systems and is ready to take real ownership in a fast-moving product environment. You'll design, build and run the services behind our product: Node.js services, APIs, and the databases underneath. You'll also have enough frontend understanding to see how your APIs are used and to contribute to the UI when a feature needs it. You'll work closely with senior engineers on architecture, and you'll be trusted to own features from design through deployment. We want someone who writes thoughtful, reliable code, cares about how systems behave in production, and wants to build things users depend on.

Responsibilities:

• Design, build and maintain backend services using Node.js and Express, and own features end-to-end from design through deployment and monitoring.
• Design and develop RESTful APIs that are clean, scalable, secure and well-documented, with the frontend developer experience in mind.
• Work closely with frontend engineers to define API contracts, and contribute to React.js features when a task spans the stack.
• Work with our databases (MongoDB and PostgreSQL/MySQL): model data, write and optimise queries, and choose the right store for each use case.
• Deploy and operate services on AWS (EC2 S3 Lambda, RDS) as part of day-to-day development.
• Improve performance and reliability through caching, error handling, logging, monitoring and alerting.
• Write clean, testable code with solid unit and integration test coverage, and review teammates' code with useful feedback.
• Contribute to technical design discussions and help shape architecture decisions.
• Investigate and fix production issues across the stack, find root causes, and put in place fixes that stop them from recurring.

Requirements:

• 2-5 years of hands-on backend development experience in a production environment.
• Strong proficiency in Node.js, with a track record of building and maintaining REST APIs used in production.
• Solid experience with at least one database (MongoDB, PostgreSQL or MySQL), including schema design, indexing and query optimisation.
• Hands-on experience deploying and running services on AWS or another cloud provider.
• Working knowledge of React.js (components, hooks, state and API integration), enough to understand how the frontend consumes your services and to make changes when needed.
• Strong fundamentals in JavaScript, Git, debugging and API authentication (JWT, OAuth).
• A clear understanding of HTTP, web security basics, and how to build services that hold up under real traffic.

Nice-to-Have:

• Experience with, or strong interest in, AI/ML: building with LLM APIs (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc. ), working on AI-powered features, or exploring the space through side projects.
• Experience with TypeScript or Next.js .
• Hands-on experience with Docker, CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows.
• Exposure to caching (Redis), message queues (SQS, RabbitMQ, Kafka) or background job processing.
• Experience with observability tools for logging, metrics and tracing.
• Experience shipping full-stack features end-to-end, from database to UI.
• A visible portfolio: GitHub contributions, side projects, or open-source work.