Job Specifications
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