This is not a promotion title for a mid-level developer. This is for the engineer who decides how systems are structured — who owns architecture, not just implementation within it.
You'll work directly with the CTO and product leadership to translate ambiguous business problems into system design. You'll define scope, propose architecture, own decisions end-to-end, and be accountable for outcomes.
If you've always worked within someone else's architecture, this isn't the role. If you've been the person who defines that architecture — keep reading.
WHAT YOU'LL OWN
• System architecture: service design, inter-service communication patterns, event-driven design, and data modeling — independently, from first principles
• Technical requirement gathering directly with product and business stakeholders — you define scope, not wait for a spec
• AWS infrastructure architecture: compute, networking, data layer, and delivery
• Real-time financial data pipelines on Kafka are critical to our core product
• Data layer design across PostgreSQL (relational/transactional) and MongoDB
• Backend engineering standards the rest of the team follows
• Build vs. buy decisions with documented, defensible tradeoff reasoning
WHAT "SENIOR" MEANS HERE
• You've designed distributed systems end-to-end — not just contributed to someone else's design
• You lead technical discussions with non-technical stakeholders; you don't wait for a ticket to start thinking
• You identify over-engineering in your own work and in others' — and course-correct without prompting
• You make confident architectural decisions with incomplete information and articulate your tradeoffs clearly
• You've shipped systems you designed, not just systems you inherited
REQUIRED STACK
Node.js/Nest.js
· AWS · Kafka · PostgreSQL · MongoDB — all required in production
REQUIREMENTS
• 4–5 years of backend engineering; minimum 2 years in architecture-owning roles