Senior Backend Engineer

About the role Our clients tend to arrive holding a hard constraint: a regulator, a ledger that must balance, a dispatch board that can't blink during a shift, or twenty years of data in a system everyone is afraid of. You'd design around those, then prove it works. You own the backend architecture of an engagement: schema, service boundaries, integration strategy, and the operational story that comes with them. You also own the conversation with the client's architects, who will arrive with opinions and sometimes with a diagram. Engagements run six to eighteen months, which is long enough for shortcuts to find their way back to you. Agents draft, refactor and explain code all day here. That makes your judgment worth more, not less: what to trust, what to test, and which generated abstraction to delete before it spreads. What you'll do • Draw the boundaries. Data model and service edges, written down with the reasoning, so the next person isn't left guessing. • Build where correctness matters. You take the parts that must not be wrong, and set the patterns for everything else. • Plan the escape from legacy. Migrations that keep both worlds running until the client is ready to switch. • Set the operational baseline. Observability, backups, runbooks, and a clear answer to what happens at 3am. • Hold the line on complexity. Review designs and code, and push back on the clever thing that won't pay for itself. What we look for • Five Years of Backend Depth: TypeScript, Go, Python or similar, in production, with the scars to match. • Node and TypeScript Depth: framework choices you can defend, and comfort in the runtime when the behavior gets strange. • Postgres Under Load: locking, pooling, partitioning, and a migration plan for the table nobody is allowed to take offline. • API Design That Lasts: versioning, pagination, idempotency keys, and contracts that survive the second consumer. • Event-Driven Where It Earns It: queues, outbox patterns, and exactly-once wishes met with at-least-once reality. • Security and Audit Trails: authentication, authorization, secrets, personal data handling, and logs an auditor can follow. • Observability Built In: structured logs, traces and metrics, so whoever is on call is reading rather than guessing. • Schema Whisperer: design, query performance, transactions, and the failure modes of each at 2am. • Production Owner: you have carried a pager, learned something unpleasant, and redesigned because of it. • Boundary Defender: you integrate with systems you don't control and keep their surprises on their side of the wall. • Straight About Trade-Offs: you can size work and say plainly what you're giving up to hit a date. • Architect Translator: you explain a design to people who will never read the code, and they leave understanding it. • Fluent English, Written and Spoken: most of our work happens in a written thread or on a call, and both have to be clear. Arabic is a genuine advantage across the region. • AI With Judgment: agents make you faster, and you still spot the plausible nonsense they sometimes produce. Personal traits • Calm in incidents: you get slower and more careful when it matters, not faster and louder. • Long-game thinker: you build for month nine, not demo day. • Teacher by default: the review comment explains why, not just what. Nice to have • Regulated work: finance, healthcare, or anything with an auditor attached. • Multi-tenant products where data isolation had to be airtight. • Event sourcing or CQRS, plus the judgment to know when they're overkill. Why you'd like it here • Remote across MENA. Work from wherever you are in the region, with hours built around your team's overlap rather than someone's attendance spreadsheet. • Work that ships. Products go live in weeks, not quarters. When someone asks what you have been building, you can open it on your phone and show them. • Small teams, no ticket queue. Four to eight people carry a product from the first client call to handover. Nobody hands you a spec and disappears. • Kit and tools you choose. A budget for your setup, and for the editor, licenses and services that make you fast. No three-week procurement saga. • A learning budget with time attached. Money for the course or the conference, plus room in the week to use it. The second half is the part most places skip. • Client contact from day one. You sit in the room where the decisions get made. Plenty of engineers wait a decade for that seat. • Time off people take, and no timesheets. We measure engagements, not humans in fifteen-minute increments. Book the holiday, go, come back. Show more Show less