Backend Engineer

Backend Engineer (AI Focus) – New York

My client is a well funded early stage startup building a high scale social platform from the ground up. They are focused on building persistent, high performance systems capable of supporting massive real time traffic.

Engineers joining my client will have the opportunity to work on a greenfield platform at scale, join a focused and highly capable team, and take ownership of critical backend systems from day one. The environment is fast paced and highly collaborative, with a strong emphasis on building systems that enable AI-driven product experiences, supported by long term financial stability.

The Role

My client is looking for a Backend Engineer with strong experience in distributed systems and an interest in AI-powered products. You will play a key role in designing and building the core infrastructure that powers real-time, intelligent user experiences at scale.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, build, and deploy backend services using TypeScript and NestJS with a focus on performance, scalability, and maintainability

• Architect and implement high traffic APIs, authentication systems, and distributed services enabling real-time and AI-enhanced product features

• Model and optimize data systems across relational databases, caches, and event streaming platforms to support both operational workloads and AI-driven insights

• Build resilient, event-driven systems using pub sub patterns and long-lived connections that handle large scale concurrent usage

• Work closely with AWS infrastructure to improve deployment pipelines, scalability, and overall system reliability

• Support backend systems that enable AI and machine learning workflows, including data pipelines and real-time inference services

• Collaborate with a small, high-performing engineering team to make strong technical decisions and execute quickly with high ownership

Technical Requirements

• Strong expertise in TypeScript, Node.js, and NestJS, with the ability to design and build production grade backend systems

• Proven experience implementing secure authentication systems using OAuth, FIDO2 or WebAuthn, and JWT

• Hands on experience working with Prisma ORM, PostgreSQL or Aurora, Redis, and DynamoDB across high-scale environments

• Experience with analytics or high performance data stores such as ClickHouse is beneficial but not required

• Strong understanding of distributed systems, including event driven architecture, pub sub patterns, and message brokers such as Kafka or AWS MSK

• Experience building real time systems

• Deep familiarity with AWS and cloud infrastructure, including services such as Aurora Global Database, RDS Proxy, ElastiCache or Valkey, EKS, and Terraform

• Experience working with observability tooling such as LGTM stack and implementing modern CI/ CD pipelines

• Proven track record of building external facing systems where performance, concurrency, and reliability are critical