Strong Node expertise with experience building and maintaining production backend systems
Staff level backend engineering depth, with a strong track record building and operating high-scale APIs, services, distributed systems, or shared product capabilities in production
Strong command of backend technologies such as Node, TypeScript, Elixir, Ruby/Rails, Java, Go, Python, or similar, including runtime behavior, failure modes, and production tradeoffs
Strong SQL and relational database judgment, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, profiling, data modeling, transactions, read and write patterns, and performance tuning
Practical understanding of service-oriented architecture, event-driven architecture, queues, background jobs, webhooks, Redis or similar caching tools, and systems that need to scale under real production load
Working knowledge of production infrastructure and platform concerns, enough to reason through deployments, containers, CI/CD pipelines, cloud services, networking basics, observability, and operational debugging
Strong production ownership mindset, with the ability to use logs, metrics, traces, dashboards, alerts, incident reviews, and system behavior to improve reliability over time
Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, mentor engineers, facilitate technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs clearly, and connect backend technical choices to customer impact, business needs, and long term maintainability
Previous work in or close partnership with infrastructure, platform, SRE, DevOps, or data teams
Familiarity with Elasticsearch, BigQuery, analytics pipelines, search infrastructure, reporting workflows, or high-volume data processing
Responsible use of AI-assisted engineering workflows to improve debugging, testing, documentation, refactoring, prototyping, or developer experience without compromising quality or understanding
Got cold feet? If you’re thinking you don’t meet 100% of the above qualifications, you should still seriously consider applying