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