Role Overview
We are hiring one Senior Backend Engineer to take end-to-end ownership of our serverless backend — a hands-on IC role for someone both technically excellent and comfortable being one of the few people the entire backend depends on. You'll own the services across several Node.js and Python repositories, work directly with the founders and product team, and set the technical bar for reliability, security, and performance.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, build, and operate AWS Lambda services across our HCM/workforce, project-management, commercial/revenue, permissions, and document domains — each comprising dozens of functions.
- Own the multi-tenant PostgreSQL data layer — schema design, query performance, and the permission/relationship model — end to end.
- Maintain and evolve the request path — API Gateway → custom Lambda authorizer → VPC-bound Lambda → private databases — including the runtime IAM/credential model that scopes every request.
- Safeguard tenant isolation and security across a per-company Cognito authentication model.
- Build and maintain integrations with external construction data environments (Asite, Autodesk Construction Cloud), including large-scale document synchronization.
- Optimize performance and reliability to keep latency-sensitive endpoints well within platform limits under growing load.
- Raise the engineering bar — testing, observability, CI/CD, and modernization of legacy components.
- Debug and resolve production incidents to root cause, and put safeguards in place so they don't recur.
- Document decisions and designs and collaborate with the frontend (Angular) and product teams.
Challenges you'll solve.
We prefer to be candid — these are the problems that make this role genuinely interesting:
Latency under a hard ceiling
API Gateway terminates any request beyond 29 seconds regardless of the Lambda's own timeout — yet much of our value comes from heavy cross-project reporting. You'll keep p95 latency within budget through set-based SQL, pagination, streaming, and asynchronous processing.
Least-privilege, per-request security
A shared custom authorizer mints short-lived, request-scoped credentials via sts:AssumeRole under a strict 2,048-character inline session-policy limit. You'll design permission models that stay within that budget and reason about IAM precisely.
Graph-shaped data, relational store
The permission and relationship model is inherently graph-like, but lives in PostgreSQL — you'll model it with recursive queries, careful indexing, and set-based traversal rather than reaching for a separate graph engine.
Watertight multi-tenancy
One Cognito pool per company and tenant-scoped access throughout — isolation is a first-order concern.
VPC-bound serverless
Lambdas run inside a VPC to reach private databases; you'll manage cold starts, connection lifecycles, and pool limits.
Resilient external integrations
Syncing large document sets from third-party APIs (including SOAP/XML) demands backpressure, deduplication, retries, and graceful partial-failure handling.
Compute-heavy workloads
Server-side PDF generation, image processing, and multi-currency handling within Lambda's memory and time constraints.
The stack.
Runtime — Node.js, Python, AWS Lambda
AWS services — -1 API Gateway, Lambda, Cognito, STS / IAM, Secrets Manager, S3 CloudWatch, VPC, EC2
Infrastructure & CI/CD- AWS SAM, CodePipeline → CodeBuild Shared Data —PostgreSQL
Qualifications.
- 5+ years building and operating production backend systems.
- Deep expertise in Node.js and JavaScript — the asynchronous model, event loop, and memory behavior — plus solid working proficiency in Python and its production behavior.
- Strong hands-on AWS experience, ideally serverless (Lambda, API Gateway, IAM/STS, VPC, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch) — able to reason about IAM policies, not just apply them.
- Advanced SQL and relational data modeling — set-based query design and a working understanding of why N+1 patterns cause production issues.
- Proven production-debugging ability — root-cause analysis in distributed systems from logs and first principles.
- Strong ownership, sound judgment, and clear written communication — able to make good decisions with incomplete information and explain trade-offs to non-engineers.
Interview Process
Introductory call-Mutual fit and role overview.
Technical deep-dive- A walkthrough of a challenging production problem you have owned.
Practical exercise -A realistic backend task, or a walkthrough of your own representative code.
System design- Collaborative design on a real scenario.
Final conversation- Values, ownership, compensation, and offer.
Skills:- Python, NodeJS (Node.js), AWS Lambda, PostgreSQL, Serverless, API Gateway and puppeteer
