Senior Backend Engineer

About SQUID

SQUID creates a loyalty and rewards platform designed to help retailers foster stronger, more valuable connections with their customers and local communities. Our platform accommodates hundreds of thousands of users and handles millions of transactions across loyalty, rewards, payments, and partner integrations. As we scale, we are focused on enhancing the platform’s scalability, reliability, and technical infrastructure.

Role Overview

We are seeking a Senior Backend Engineer (Architecture & Platform) to take lead responsibility for the backend architecture and contribute actively to the ongoing development of the SQUID platform. This hands-on technical leadership role involves making key architectural and system design choices while also writing, reviewing, and improving production code. You'll collaborate with product and engineering teams to translate business needs into effective technical solutions with autonomy to refine system design, documentation, operation, and evolution. While not a people-management position, mentoring colleagues and promoting engineering excellence are expected.

Key Responsibilities

• Own and advance SQUID’s backend platform architecture.
• Lead design of systems for new products, services, and partner integrations.
• Develop and maintain service APIs using TypeScript and Node.js.
• Make balanced architectural decisions considering scalability, reliability, development speed, and cost.
• Document technical choices and clearly communicate trade-offs.
• Enhance system performance, security, observability, and resilience.
• Set and uphold standards for API design, testing, code quality, and operational readiness.
• Conduct code reviews and provide technical guidance to the engineering team.
• Address and prioritize technical debt alongside feature delivery.
• Lead technical incident management and work to prevent issue recurrence.
• Collaborate on integrations with external partners for payments, rewards, webhooks, and customer data.
• Work closely with product, design, and commercial teams throughout project lifecycles.

Required Qualifications & Skills

• Extensive backend engineering experience, generally seven or more years.
• Proven expertise in architecting and building production systems with TypeScript, JavaScript, and Node.js.
• Experience making informed architectural and system design decisions.
• Strong command of relational databases, including data modelling and SQL.
• Competency in designing secure, reliable, and well-documented RESTful APIs.
• Experience operating production systems on public cloud platforms, preferably Google Cloud Platform.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems, scalability, fault tolerance, and reliability.
• Knowledge integrating third-party platforms like payment processors, rewards partners, or external APIs.
• Strong problem-solving and debugging abilities across applications, databases, and infrastructure.
• Familiarity with automated testing, continuous integration/delivery pipelines, monitoring, and observability tools.
• Clear communication skills capable of explaining complex technical topics to both technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• A pragmatic and collaborative work style combined with willingness to maintain hands-on technical involvement.

Desirable Skills & Experience

• Exposure to high-volume transaction, payment, loyalty, rewards, or fintech systems.
• Experience with GCP services such as Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, or BigQuery.
• Knowledge of webhook design, including idempotency, authentication, and HMAC request signing.
• Familiarity with platforms like Stripe or Firebase.
• Some experience with frontend frameworks such as React.
• Experience with NoSQL databases, event-driven architectures, or geospatial data handling.
• Mentoring or technical leadership experience in teams or platforms.
• Previous work in scaling startups or product-driven tech companies.

Education & Other Information

A degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering or related discipline is appreciated though not mandatory; equivalent professional experience is also highly regarded.

Success Criteria

Within six months, you should develop profound knowledge of the SQUID platform, assume responsibility for key architecture decisions, clarify the technical roadmap, and drive improvements in the backend reliability and scalability. You'll be a trusted technical authority within the engineering team deeply engaged in development and delivery.