This description is a summary of our understanding of the job description. Click on 'Apply' button to find out more. Role Description We're looking for a senior backend engineer to own and evolve core platform services. You'll work across our TypeScript/Node.js codebase improving existing services, consolidating where we've over-split, building real-time collaboration infrastructure, and making architectural decisions that affect every user on the platform. If you enjoy making existing systems better as much as building new ones, this is the role. What You'll Actually Do - Build real-time collaboration infrastructure - Design and implement the systems that enable multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously. - Work with WebSockets and Firebase to manage presence, state synchronization, and conflict resolution across web and mobile clients. - Evolve and consolidate backend services - Improve existing services, merge where boundaries don't earn their keep, simplify data models, and own reliability and performance in production. - Improve event-driven systems - Optimize and simplify asynchronous workflows that power content processing, notifications, and cross-service communication. - Work with SQS, SNS, and EventBridge to make existing pipelines more reliable, observable, and maintainable. - Shape technical direction - Lead architectural discussions, evaluate trade-offs, and make decisions that balance speed of delivery with long-term maintainability. - Contribute to our engineering standards and help define how we build software as the team grows. - Work across the full product surface - Collaborate with frontend, mobile, and product teams to deliver features that span the entire stack. - Understand how your APIs and services are consumed and design them with the developer experience in mind. Qualifications - 7+ years of backend development, with 3+ years in Node.js/TypeScript - Strong track record building and operating production services at scale - Deep understanding of serverless architectures and AWS services - Experience with real-time systems (WebSockets, Firebase, or similar) - Comfort with distributed systems patterns: eventual consistency, idempotency, event sourcing Requirements - Designed and built APIs serving thousands of concurrent users - Modeled data in DynamoDB or similar NoSQL databases for high-throughput access patterns - Built event-driven architectures with message queues and pub/sub systems - Debugged production issues across distributed, asynchronous services - Made meaningful architectural decisions and owned their outcomes - Bonus: experience with Python for backend services Benefits - Equity options - Unlimited PTO (we actually take it) - $200/month wellness stipend - Health insurance stipend - Home office budget