About Eequ
Eequ is a marketplace and booking platform for learning experiences outside traditional schools and universities. Providers use Eequ to list activities, take bookings and payments, and manage their programmes.
We are the market-leading supplier to local authorities in the UK for council-funded programmes and we also serve thousands of independent providers. Our platform handles bookings, payments, and data at scale.
Our vision is to build the infrastructure for a more decentralised model of education, where anyone can create, share, and find learning experiences; from forest school leaders to sports coaches and artists.
We are a product-led company, and engineering sits at the heart of everything we do. Our product is the company, and its quality defines our reputation, reliability, and growth. Because of this, our engineers, and the decisions they make, carry the greatest weight in shaping our direction and our future.
Role summary
We are hiring a Senior Backend Engineer with strong experience in Node.js / NestJS and AWS, who will:
* Own day-to-day deployments of our backend services.
* Lead monitoring and incident response for production systems.
* Take primary ownership of our AWS infrastructure, using infrastructure as code.
* Design and implement backend features for a high-traffic, transactional booking platform.
* Raise the standard of engineering practice across the team through example, review, and coaching.
This is a high-seniority individual contributor role. You will need experience across the end-to-end software development lifecycle. You will be hands-on, responsible for both building and deploying the systems you work on.
Your core responsibilities
You will have clear ownership in four main areas:
1️⃣ Backend systems
* Design, build, and maintain backend services in NestJS / TypeScript.
* Implement features that support bookings, payments, reporting, and data exports.
* Maintain and improve our database schema and query patterns in MySQL.
* Ensure code is reliable, testable, and maintainable.
2️⃣ Deployments and release process
* Own the deployment pipeline for backend services, from build to production.
* Improve the safety and speed of deployments (for example blue-green or zero-downtime deployments).
* Reduce manual steps and failure points in the release process.
* Ensure that other backend engineers can deploy confidently using the tools and processes you establish.
3️⃣ Infrastructure and monitoring
* Take primary responsibility for our AWS-based infrastructure (EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch and related services).
* Manage resources using infrastructure as code tools.
* Maintain and improve observability: logging, metrics, alerts, and dashboards.
* Lead incident response when production issues occur and drive follow-up improvements.
4️⃣ Technical direction and coaching
* Make and communicate architectural choices for backend and infrastructure.
* Review code from other backend engineers and give clear, constructive feedback.
* Help the team adopt better patterns in testing, performance, security, and reliability.
* Share knowledge so that deployment and operational capability is spread across the team, not held by one person.
🧠 The kinds of problems you will work on
Examples of the work you may lead or contribute to:
* Extending our Stripe integration to support user-configurable payouts and flexible payment plans.
* Splitting our email functionality into a separate, scalable service with clear interfaces.
* Designing and building a robust CSV export pipeline that maintains high performance as data volume increases.
* Improving data caching and query patterns to handle booking surges without performance degradation.
* Removing the remaining downtime from our current deployment process and moving towards fully zero-downtime releases.
* Defining and implementing a monitoring and alerting strategy that gives the team timely and useful signals.
🪞About you
We are looking for someone who is already operating at a senior level, with a track record of both building and running production systems.
🦉 Experience
* Typically 8+ years of experience as a backend engineer, with significant time in a senior role.
* Experience owning production systems that serve large numbers of users and handle real money transactions.
* Clear evidence of taking responsibility for deployments, infrastructure, and reliability, not just feature delivery.
* Experience in smaller or growing organisations where you have had direct ownership and autonomy, not only in large, highly siloed teams.
💻 Core technical skills
* Strong experience with Node.js and TypeScript in production.
* Deep expertise in NestJS and Microservices, or a willingness and ability to learn it quickly if you have a strong TypeScript backend background.
* Strong skills in relational database design and optimisation, ideally with MySQL and TypeORM.
* Hands-on experience deploying and operating systems on AWS (for example EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch).
* Practical experience using infrastructure as code tools to manage cloud infrastructure.
* Good understanding of CI/CD pipelines, automated testing, and safe deployment practices.
* Experience working with monitoring, alerting, and incident management tooling.
* Experience with managing shared libraries, dependencies, and building pipelines in a large TypeScript monorepo.
🧗🏼♀️ How you think and work
* You are comfortable taking full ownership of a problem from design through to stable operation in production.
* You think clearly about trade-offs and can explain them in plain language to technical and non-technical colleagues.
* You prefer simple, robust solutions over complex ones and keep long-term maintenance in mind when making decisions.
* You are methodical in diagnosing and fixing production issues and see incidents as opportunities to improve the system.
* You keep security, data protection, and privacy in mind when designing systems, especially when dealing with government and payment data.
🤝 How you work with others
We are a remote-first team with colleagues in different locations. Clear communication is essential.
We are looking for someone who:
* Writes clearly in English and documents decisions and designs in a structured way.
* Can explain technical ideas verbally and visually (for example on a call, with a shared screen or simple diagrams).
* Is comfortable joining calls with non-technical stakeholders, including local authority clients, when needed to discuss technical topics such as security or infrastructure.
* Gives and receives feedback constructively, including through code reviews.
* Helps others grow by sharing knowledge effectively.
This role is full-time and focused. It is not suitable for someone trying to balance multiple jobs or major side commitments.
🇪🇺 Location and right to work
We can consider candidates:
* Based in the UK or EEA,
* With an existing right to work in their country of residence.
We are not able to sponsor visas for this role.
How to apply
To apply, please complete our Typeform as a first step:
https://k2oyc9ipykq.typeform.com/to/OmDOsgL6
The process will include:
* Initial introduction chat with our CEO
* A practical technical interview focused on real backend and infrastructure scenarios we face at Eequ. We will discuss how you would approach specific problems so we can understand your judgement and communication.
Equal opportunities
Eequ is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and walks of life.