Senior Backend Engineer

We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer (SDE-3) to own system-level architecture and technical direction across our AI product platform. Our products span voice-based interview systems, an agentic orchestration engine, fraud detection, data enrichment, and a growing suite of AI-native tools. You'll operate at the intersection of backend systems, data infrastructure, and applied AI - making foundational decisions that the rest of the engineering team builds on.

Responsibilities:

• Drive feature strategy alongside product - break down complex product bets into phased technical plans and lead execution across the team.
• Own the full lifecycle of major product features - scoping, technical design, cross-team coordination, delivery, and post-launch iteration.
• Architect and evolve our backend platform across Node.js/TypeScript and Python services on AWS - making decisions on service boundaries, data flow, resilience, and scale.
• Own end-to-end delivery of large, ambiguous projects - from scoping and design through rollout and operational stability.
• Design and maintain our data layer spanning PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, Elasticsearch, and Athena; own the lightweight data warehouse strategy, including schema design, query optimisation, and data pipeline reliability.
• Define and enforce infrastructure-as-code practices with Terraform; drive containerization and orchestration standards with Docker and Kubernetes.
• Lead the technical approach to AI-native product development - agentic orchestration, LLM integration patterns, tool-use architectures, and real-time voice systems.
• Champion secure engineering practices across the team - establish standards for auth (OAuth/JWT/RBAC), input validation, secrets management, dependency scanning, OWASP compliance, and data privacy.
• Set engineering standards for code quality, testing, observability, and incident response.
• Mentor SDE-1s and SDE-2s through design reviews, code reviews, and pairing; raise the bar on engineering culture.
• Be a force multiplier - identify bottlenecks (technical and process), propose solutions, and unblock the team.

Requirements:

• 5 - 8+ years of backend engineering experience with deep expertise in TypeScript/Node.js (NestJS, Express) and strong Python proficiency.
• Proven track record of designing and scaling distributed systems in production on AWS.
• Strong multi-database fluency - you've architected systems across relational (PostgreSQL), NoSQL (DynamoDB), search (Elasticsearch), and analytical stores (Athena), and can reason about when to use what.
• Hands-on with Terraform, Docker, and Kubernetes - you've set up and maintained production infrastructure, not just used it.
• Experience managing data at scale - schema evolution, ETL/ELT patterns, query performance, and lightweight warehouse maintenance.
• Strong security posture - experience designing secure systems end-to-end, including auth architectures, threat modelling, secure CI/CD pipelines, and compliance-aware data handling.
• Deep understanding of the AI landscape - LLMs, agentic patterns, function calling, RAG, embeddings - and the ability to translate that into engineering decisions.
• Awareness of GCP and Azure architectures, even if AWS is your primary.
• Strong opinions on system design, loosely held - you make architectural tradeoffs explicit and drive alignment across teams.
• Startup tempo - you ship fast without cutting corners on what matters.

Nice to Have:

• Experience building voice/realtime AI systems (WebRTC, streaming APIs).
• Hands-on with agent orchestration frameworks or building custom agent runtimes.
• Prior experience as a technical lead or architect in a startup scaling from 15 to 50+ engineers.
• Exposure to cross-account AWS architectures, security posture design (SCPs, IAM boundaries).
• Frontend familiarity, especially React, Next.js and Vercel.