Senior Backend Engineer (TypeScript/Node.js) - In person interview -W2 role

About the Role We're looking for a senior engineer who doesn't just write code \- they own outcomes. You'll be responsible for the full lifecycle of backend services: from design and development through production reliability. In an era where AI can generate code, we value engineers who think critically, anticipate problems, and drive systems forward. **What We Expect** **End\-to\-End Ownership** \- Own features from design \-\> development \-\> testing \-\> deployment \-\> production support \- Take accountability for the reliability and performance of your services in production \- Drive technical decisions without waiting to be told what to do **System Design \& Architecture** \- Design scalable, resilient distributed systems handling millions of daily transactions \- Make pragmatic trade\-off decisions (consistency vs. availability, complexity vs. speed) \- Produce clear technical design documents and lead design reviews \- Evaluate build vs. buy decisions with data **Development** \- Strong proficiency in TypeScript and Node.js \- Build high\-throughput, low\-latency microservices using frameworks like NestJS, Express, or Fastify \- Write clean, type\-safe, maintainable code \- but more importantly, know when and what to build **Testing \& Quality** \- Write meaningful unit, integration, and contract tests \- not just for coverage metrics \- Own E2E test strategy for your services \- Build confidence in deployments through automated validation **Infrastructure \& Cloud (AWS)** \- Hands\-on with AWS services (ECS/EKS, Lambda, S3, SQS, CloudWatch, IAM) \- Understand networking, security, and cost implications of architectural choices \- Comfortable with Infrastructure as Code (Terraform/CloudFormation) **Data \& Messaging** \- Kafka \- design event\-driven architectures, manage topics, handle consumer lag and rebalancing \- Redis \- caching strategies, pub/sub, cluster management \- MongoDB/DocumentDB \- schema design, indexing, query optimization, aggregation pipelines \- DynamoDB \- single\-table design, GSI/LSI strategies, capacity planning, streams **Monitoring \& Observability** \- Datadog \- build dashboards, set meaningful alerts, track SLOs, analyze APM traces \- Splunk \- log analysis, search queries, correlation across services for incident investigation \- Understand distributed tracing, structured logging, and metric\-driven decision making **SRE Mindset** \- Analyze production incidents: read logs, trace requests, identify root cause under pressure \- Think about failure modes before they happen (circuit breakers, retries, fallbacks, graceful degradation) \- Participate in on\-call rotations and drive blameless post\-mortems \- Proactively identify capacity risks and performance bottlenecks **Proactive Analysis \& Innovation** \- Identify risks, tech debt, and performance bottlenecks before they become incidents \- Propose and drive improvements \- don't wait for a ticket \- Stay current with industry trends and bring relevant ideas to the team \- Challenge existing patterns when they no longer serve the system **Nice to Have** \- Experience with circuit breaker patterns (opossum, cockatiel) \- Performance tuning at scale (Node.js event loop, worker threads, connection pools) \- Experience with CI/CD pipelines and deployment strategies (blue\-green, canary) \- Contributions to internal tooling or developer experience improvements \- Experience leading technical initiatives across multiple teams