Role Overview

We are seeking an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to join our Engineering team, working within a high-performing backend competency area. In this role you will be responsible for setting and implementing standards that enable the efficient delivery of high-quality, highly available APIs and services. You will be an integral member of a cross-functional team and will report to an Engineering Manager.

What you will be doing

• Designing, building and maintaining the API infrastructure, services and systems that power high-traffic, consumer-facing applications for our clients.
• Extensively collaborating with Product, Frontend, UX and other engineering stakeholders on requirements, their implementation, process improvements and domain analysis.
• Implementing backend services that realise customer value, focussing on quality through testing, automation and code review.
• Critically analysing the systems you work on to identify performance bottlenecks and opportunities for improved scalability, reliability and customer experience.
• Writing and shipping code that is idiomatic, maintainable and efficient, and debugging and resolving production issues across services.
• Recognising impediments to team efficiency (technical debt) and proposing and implementing improvements to standards, tooling and processes.

What you must have

• At least 5 years of professional experience building backend services for production systems.
• Extensive, idiomatic Node.js experience, including building large, highly available APIs and services.
• A strong understanding of the RESTful API paradigm (GraphQL and event-driven architectures are definitely a plus).
• Strong working knowledge of JavaScript and/or TypeScript and the Node.js ecosystem (Express, NestJS, Fastify or equivalent).
• Solid relational database experience, particularly with MySQL or PostgreSQL, including schema design, query optimisation and indexing.
• Thorough understanding and extensive experience with automated testing (unit, integration and end-to-end).
• Working knowledge of caching layers such as Redis, and familiarity with message and queueing systems.
• Hands-on experience deploying and operating services on AWS and/or Google Cloud, including familiarity with containerisation (Docker, Kubernetes).
• Good working knowledge of the use of Git.
• Experience within an agile development environment.
• A solid understanding of CI/CD concepts and automated release management for backend services.

About you

For us to achieve our ambitious vision together as a team, It is important for our Martians to lead at all levels, be self starters who take initiative and put their hands up for challenging tasks. A growth mindset is important to us and we encourage all our Martians to openly share knowledge, support and help each other, ask questions, get creative with new technologies and learn from setbacks.

Becoming a Martian means

• Comfortably working and learning from a fully remote, culturally diverse team based predominantly in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana.
• Being an open, honest and respectful communicator.
• You enjoy asking questions, identifying areas of improvement and proposing solutions, no matter your job title or whether you have been with us for a day, a month or years!
• You are comfortable taking initiative and operating independently.
• You thrive in a fast paced environment, where change is constant.
• You find it exciting to work with various clients, from different industries, each with a different problem for you and your team to solve.
• Intentionally sharing tech and industry trends that excite you with your peers.
• Seeking continuous feedback and actively taking steps to continuously grow personally and professionally.