Staff Node.js Developer - Architecture

We are looking for a Staff Node.js Developer - Architecture .

This role is fully remote, we accept candidates from anywhere around the globe, given that candidates are within an acceptable time-zone difference to UTC+4 (at least 5 hours of overlap) .

Salary: up to 42 EUR/h (on a B2B) .

Start date: September 2026

Duration: till 31.12.2026

Engagement: Full-time

Requirements

We are looking for Software Engineers with:

(8+ years of experience), comfortable designing across several teams' surfaces — everything a strong Senior does, plus:

• Anticipate future use cases and design to minimize the cost of change, and express that trade-off in cost terms rather than aesthetic ones.
• Anticipate scaling limits across a domain before they bind, including shared dependencies such as authentication and supplier integrations, and raise capacity implications during design review rather than after launch.
• Review others' designs substantively — identify a design that will not scale or will be expensive to change, and say so early and constructively.
• Work comfortably as a technical peer to Staff engineers and engineering managers, including disagreeing with them productively.
• Design services using well-understood patterns for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling — bounded contexts, deliberately minimizing cross-service dependencies for resilience.
• Design for expected peak load rather than average, know the limits of the services and third-party dependencies a feature relies on, and validate those limits by testing rather than by reasoning alone.
• Build components other teams can adopt, with documentation and a migration path — treating other teams as consumers, not recipients.
• Design with abuse in mind by default — rate limits, velocity checks, idempotency — and raise risk trade-offs during design and review rather than after launch.

Also required:

• Reading and being able to explain every line of AI-generated code you ship — no merging what you can't explain.
• Testing that actually covers edge and failure cases, not just happy-path coverage.
• Working command of OWASP Top 10 and secure-by-default habits (secrets management, input validation, data handling).
• Strong written English — most collaboration happens asynchronously via RFCs and reviews.
• A collaborative style: you bring options with trade-offs, argue with reasoning rather than seniority, and can lose a technical argument gracefully.

Responsibilities:

This isn't a "managed team" gig and it isn't ticket-closing work. The client has strong internal engineers already — what they're bringing in is deep system design and architecture judgement : help deciding what to build, where the boundaries sit, what breaks first under load, and what's expensive to change a year from now. You'll work as a technical peer to the client's Staff engineers and engineering managers, inside their existing rituals (planning, standups, design review), and your designs go into production — not into a slide deck.

What you'd actually be doing:

• Digging into an existing multi-product architecture to understand why it looks the way it does before proposing changes.
• Delivering an honest, evidence-based assessment of code and design quality across product lines — correctness on money/stock paths, security posture, coupling between product lines, capacity risk.
• Writing and reviewing RFCs and ADRs for new and evolving systems: assumptions, failure modes, capacity, security made explicit.
• Designing extend-vs-rebuild decisions with the migration path built in from day one — incremental, reversible, with a rollback story.
• Working with real constraints: multi-currency payments ( IQD/AED/SAR ), fraud and abuse exposure, PCI DSS scope , third-party supplier integrations, and traffic spikes up to 65x baseline .

Benefits

• 100% remote work;
• work with an experienced team of developers and continuous development of your hard and soft skills;
• long-term collaboration on challenging products