About the Role This is a contractor role through X-Team. As a Senior Backend Engineer, you will join a high-impact product squad dedicated to building and scaling high-throughput, low-latency discovery systems. You will take ownership of complex backend architecture, focusing on feed delivery, recommendation pipelines, and event-driven data flows. In this role, you will investigate intricate system behavior, resolve high-level performance bottlenecks, and incrementally modernize a large-scale production codebase to support continuous product growth. Most Important Senior Backend Expertise with 5+ years of hands-on experience designing, building, and maintaining scalable distributed backend systems and APIs for high-traffic products. Core Technical Mastery in Node.js and TypeScript, with demonstrated experience constructing resilient GraphQL or RESTful services. Data & Event Architectures proficiency with NoSQL databases (e.g., DynamoDB) and event-driven stream processing (e.g., Kinesis, EventBridge). System Performance & Observability experience managing data consistency, performance tuning, and incident triage in complex, production environments. Cloud & Infrastructure fluency with AWS services (e.g., ECS, DynamoDB, PostgreSQL) and containerized deployments. Testing Rigor with a strong history of writing comprehensive unit, integration, and end-to-end tests for critical backend flows. Nice to Have Recommendation & Feed Systems experience working on user discovery, feed algorithms, or data-heavy personalization engines. Infrastructure as Code familiarity using Terraform to provision and manage cloud environments. Client-Side Awareness exposure to mobile stack contexts (e.g., React Native) to collaborate effectively with frontend engineers. Ecosystem Tooling experience with NestJS, Apollo GraphQL, Sentry, Snowflake, or search/vector databases. Personal Traits Problem Triage & Investigation expert who excels at diving deep into complex existing codebases, identifying root causes, and implementing clean, long-term solutions. Product-Minded Engineer who understands technical tradeoffs in the context of business impact and member experience. Collaborative Partner who works seamlessly across product, QA, and data engineering in a fully remote environment. Pragmatic Modernizer who balances feature delivery with continuous refactoring and technical debt reduction.