Senior Engineer (React/Node, GCP/Cloudflare), AI-native, long-term. Read the first paragraph before you apply

Senior Engineer (React/Node, GCP/Cloudflare), AI-native, long-term. Read the first lines before you apply.
 

IF YOU CAN'T SOLVE BASIC systemdesign.io PROBLEMS, DO NOT APPLY. I WILL THROW A SYSTEM DESIGN EXERCISE AT YOU DURING THE INTERVIEW, AND WE WILL BOTH LOSE TIME IF YOU CAN'T SOLVE IT.

This is not a formality. The URL shortener is the floor. If you can only solve the "easy" problems, this role is not for you. My last round of interviews was full of people who could not reason through a basic system, so I am being blunt on purpose.
 

WHO I AM
I am a senior developer and CTO running a small high-end dev agency. I only take serious, high-stakes work. No WordPress, no throwaway projects. Full remote, building for clients all over the world. This role is not customer-facing: you work directly with me, I deal with the clients. I want someone long-term who becomes part of the company and builds something real with me, done properly, never rushed or half-baked.
 

THE ROLE, DAY TO DAY
- Fully AI-driven. Your day is orchestrating AI agents (Claude, Codex, and similar), reading and reviewing their code, and holding the line on quality, including blocking a merge when the output is not good enough. You are not hand-writing everything.
- Building genuinely cool things and going deep on automation.
- Stack is mostly React and Node, plus GCP and Cloudflare.
 

WHAT I ACTUALLY NEED (this is the job)
- System design. You can take requirements and design a database schema, then defend your tradeoffs. You reason about concurrency: race conditions, locking, idempotency, what happens when two requests land at the same time. You can architect a system end to end: caching, cache invalidation, failure modes, blast radius, and what breaks when traffic goes 10x.
- Real infra and cloud: GCP, Cloudflare, CI/CD, deployments.
- You can sketch an architecture live in Excalidraw. It takes two minutes to learn. If you do not know it, learn it before we talk.
- You drive AI agents every day and review their output with a critical eye.
- Fluent English, reliable, autonomous.

SETUP
- Full remote, full time. Work whenever you want, as long as the work gets done.
- $2,500/month, plus I pay for your Claude Code Max plan.
- Your own machine for now. We can look at hardware later.
- Long-term, with room to grow and become part of the company.
 

HOW TO APPLY
No cover letter, I do not read them. Send a link to a short video, 3 to 5 minutes:
1. Camera on so I can see you, screen-share your setup, and show me how you drive and review your AI agents day to day.
2. Then pick one system-design problem (a URL shortener, or a read-heavy news site serving millions of reads a day) and walk me through your design while sketching it in Excalidraw: the database schema, how you handle concurrency, what you cache and how you invalidate it, and what breaks at scale.

Keep it real, not scripted. If you send a CV or a generic AI-written message with no system-design walkthrough, I will not reply.

IF YOU CAN'T SOLVE BASIC systemdesign.io PROBLEMS, DO NOT APPLY. I WILL THROW A SYSTEM DESIGN EXERCISE AT YOU DURING THE INTERVIEW, AND WE WILL BOTH LOSE TIME IF YOU CAN'T SOLVE IT.