Staff Full-Stack Engineer - Backend and Architecture

About the Role

We’re a lean product team developing a consumer commerce platform that combines real-time 3D interactions with the purchase of physical products. The product also includes a real-money wallet and operational workflows for order processing and fulfillment.

Our technology stack is built entirely around TypeScript. The engineering team is small and experienced, with engineers working closely with and reporting directly to the CTO, allowing for fast communication and decision-making.

We’re looking for a highly experienced individual contributor to take technical ownership of backend architecture across a customer-facing web product, an internal operations platform, and the supporting services.

A key part of the role involves systems where correctness and reliability have direct financial impact, including wallet and ledger functionality, transaction settlement, verifiable outcome generation, and fulfillment workflows.

The platform follows an event-driven architecture within a TypeScript monorepo. It includes separate Fastify BFF services for customer and administrative applications, asynchronous workers, and shared domain components backed primarily by PostgreSQL. MongoDB supports analytics use cases, Valkey is used for caching and presence, RabbitMQ handles messaging, and S3-compatible storage with CDN delivery manages object distribution.

The infrastructure runs on AWS ECS with infrastructure-as-code and automated CI/CD. You’ll work closely with the CTO on architectural direction and the continued evolution of the platform.

What You'll Do

• Take ownership of architectural decisions across backend services, including service boundaries, data ownership, idempotency, outbox patterns, caching, and failure handling.
• Document important technical decisions and revisit them as requirements and system constraints evolve.
• Design and evolve financially sensitive functionality, including double-entry wallet accounting, payments and withdrawals, inventory settlement, and auditable outcome-generation mechanisms.
• Work across layers when necessary, from database schemas and Drizzle migrations through domain logic, Fastify APIs, asynchronous consumers, and React interfaces.
• Provide technical leadership for the internal operations platform supporting catalog, fulfillment, finance, and customer-support workflows.
• Establish engineering standards around contract-first APIs, deterministic testing, database migrations, and code-review quality.
• Mentor other engineers while maintaining a hands-on individual-contributor role.
• Own production reliability through observability, incident response, capacity planning, performance analysis, and ongoing reliability improvements.

What We're Looking For

• 8–9+ years of professional software engineering experience, including several years with direct responsibility for architecture and technical decisions in production systems.
• Proven experience defining service boundaries, selecting appropriate storage technologies, and scaling production systems.
• Practical understanding of capacity planning, caching strategies, database connection management, performance bottlenecks, and production debugging.
• Ability to evaluate architectural trade-offs such as consistency vs. availability, synchronous vs. asynchronous communication, caching vs. source-of-truth access, and build vs. buy decisions.
• Strong server-side engineering background with Node.js/TypeScript, .NET, or Java. Engineers coming from .NET or Java should be comfortable transitioning to TypeScript.
• Deep experience with relational databases, including schema design, transactions and isolation levels, indexing, and migrations of live production systems.
• Experience using document databases and caching systems where they provide clear advantages alongside relational storage.
• Production experience with event-driven architectures, message brokers, idempotent processing, outbox patterns, and delivery guarantees.
• Experience owning financially sensitive systems such as payments, billing, ledgers, trading, or similar transaction-heavy functionality.
• Ability to document architectural decisions clearly and challenge technical assumptions when necessary.

Nice to Have

• Experience with AWS ECS, infrastructure as code, and GitHub Actions-based CI/CD.
• Experience with CDN infrastructure and object storage at scale.
• Background in regulated or compliance-sensitive consumer products such as fintech, real-money gaming, or marketplaces.
• Experience managing developer experience and tooling in large monorepos using technologies such as pnpm workspaces or Turborepo.

Technology Stack: Node.js · TypeScript · Fastify · PostgreSQL · Drizzle · MongoDB · Valkey · RabbitMQ · Zod · AWS ECS · S3/CDN · React 19 · Vite · pnpm · Turborepo