Senior Backend Engineer

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer with deep expertise in building, scaling, and securing production-grade backend systems. You will own the backend of a complex, multi-module SaaS platform covering CRM, payroll, ERP, financial management, and AI-powered automation workflows.

We are not looking for a traditional developer. We want someone who works smart uses modern AI development tools as a core part of their workflow, ships with confidence, and takes real ownership over what they build.

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs across multiple product domains
• Own database architecture, schema design, query optimisation, and migration management
• Design and manage background job processing, queue architecture, and worker systems
• Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks, security vulnerabilities, and reliability issues
• Set up and maintain observability structured logging, error monitoring, and alerting
• Define and enforce backend engineering standards, patterns, and best practices
• Collaborate with frontend and infrastructure on system integration and deployment

• 4+ years of production backend engineering with Node.js and TypeScript
• Deep PostgreSQL knowledge schema design, indexing strategies, query analysis, migrations
• Strong understanding of distributed systems queues, async patterns, concurrency, consistency
• Production experience with NestJS and/or Express
• Background job processing BullMQ, Bull, or equivalent queue systems
• Redis caching, pub/sub, session management
• API design REST, WebSockets, real-time communication patterns
• Security authentication, authorisation, input validation, secrets management
• Performance optimisation profiling, connection pooling, query tuning, caching strategies
• Observability structured logging (Pino or equivalent), error tracking (Sentry or equivalent)
• Testing unit and integration testing for backend services
• AI development tools Claude, Cursor, Codex, or equivalent (must use these daily, not occasionally)

• Cloud platform experience GCP, AWS, or Azure (comfortable operating cloud-native applications)
• Docker and containerised deployments
• AI / LLM API integration experience
• Frontend familiarity the platform is built on React and Next.js

• Deep backend instincts you think about failure modes, race conditions, and data integrity by default
• You have operated systems under real load and know what breaks and why
• Security-conscious you don't need to be reminded to sanitise inputs or rotate secrets
• AI-native you use Claude, Cursor, Codex, or similar tools as a natural part of how you work, not as a novelty
• Ownership mentality you see things through from design to deployment to monitoring
• Clear communicator you can explain technical tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders
• Self-directed you can take a problem statement and drive it to a solution independently
• Comfortable in large, complex codebases without needing everything to be perfectly clean first
• Not a traditional 9-to-5 developer you're curious, keep up with what's changing, and apply it

We evaluate on real work, not CVs. Please share:

• GitHub profile, live products, Upwork profile or open source contributions show us what you have built
• A brief note on the most complex backend system you have worked on what it was, your role, and the outcome
• Examples of how you use AI development tools in your day-to-day engineering work
• Anything in this description outside your current experience and how you would close the gap