Senior Backend Developer
Pynea is a challenge-based interview intelligence system, powered by AI. We help companies hire faster and smarter by replacing CV-noise with evidence from real work and real human capability.
We’re in full build mode towards launch - and we operate like a top-tier creative engineering studio: small team, high taste, high ownership, no corporate theatre.
We’re hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to build the enterprise backbone: high-concurrency APIs, event-driven systems, and reliability foundations that turn messy hiring inputs into trusted signal : fast, secure, GDPR-safe, and ready to scale from day one. If you love turning evolving intent into production-grade systems that don’t flinch under load, you’ll thrive here.
The role (what you own)
You’ll own the enterprise backbone across a few high-impact areas:
Enterprise-grade architecture
Standardised patterns from intake → build → QA → deploy → measure. Secure by default, GDPR-safe, compliance-ready.
Full-stack workflow automation
Scalable GraphQL APIs, integrations, event-driven systems, monitoring/logging, error handling, and documentation that scales beyond you.
What you’ll build (real scope)
- High-concurrency APIs and reliability mechanisms (retries, idempotency, queues)
- Event-driven systems that don’t drop data
- Dashboards/reporting surfaces that remain consistent under load
- Cloud-ready architecture across GCP (with minimal AWs for asset management)
- Systems designed to ship fast, stay robust, and scale cleanly
What success looks like
- Features ship fast without hacks
- The system scales from 10 → 10,000+ users with confidence
- Reliability is visible: monitoring, alerts, error tracking, runbooks
- Security is default: permissions, audit trails, GDPR-safe practices
- Clear scoreboard: uptime, latency, error rates, queue health, enterprise readiness metrics
Who thrives here
You see failure modes early. You ship production-grade systems quickly. You make sharp trade-offs without sacrificing reliability. You communicate crisply async (short Looms, diagrams, notes). You enjoy building enterprise systems that teams can depend on.
Must-haves
- NodeJS
- GraphQL (NestJS)
- PostgresSQL
- Data structures
- OOP principles
- Understanding of complexity principles and correct approaches
- Experience with AI and LLMs (including but not limited to Gemini)
- Strong analytical and problem-solving skills in a fast-changing environment
- Reliability mindset: monitoring, logging, retries, QA, incident-aware design
- Comfortable operating in a sprint with incomplete context and tight deadlines
Additional Skills
- Code quality & maintainability - Writes readable, consistent, and well-structured code
- Understands trade-offs between speed of delivery and long-term maintainability
- Comfortable working in a shared codebase with established guidelines
- Testing mindset - Understands the value of unit, e2e, and regression tests to minimise disruption to the frontend apps
- Writes testable code and doesn’t rely solely on manual testing
- Collaboration & ownership - Can work closely with frontend, product, and design teams
- Takes ownership of features end-to-end
- Comfortable giving and receiving code reviews
- Experience in GCP
- Experience in Prisma
- Experience in terraform