Senior Backend / DevOps Engineer

About Us

We’re building a new kind of mortgage experience: transparent, digital, and truly customer‑centric. We are a Berlin‑based B2C Fintech founded by two repeat founders (YC alum, exit) with prior 10+ year careers in investment banking and strategy consulting. We recently raised investment to assemble a 30‑person, exceptionally strong core team. Our culture is built on ownership and clarity. We align with you on vision, set clear KPIs and resources together, and then trust your drive and expertise.

The Opportunity

Buying property (and financing it) is probably the biggest financial decision in someone’s life. It’s complicated, opaque, and anxiety‑laden. As a Senior Backend / DevOps Engineer, you will work alongside our CTO on building and evolving our fintech product. Our core architecture and cloud infrastructure are already in place and running in production — you’ll spend roughly 70% of your time shipping backend features and 30% on infrastructure and operations. You’ll have significant autonomy to shape how we build, deploy, and scale.

What You’ll Do

• Developing backend features and APIs within our microservices architecture
• Designing and implementing event‑driven patterns and workflow orchestration
• Working with PostgreSQL — schema design, migrations, query optimization
• Integrating with external APIs (mortgage platforms, CRM, document processing)
• Extending cloud infrastructure (Terraform, Helm) for new services and capabilities
• Improving CI/CD pipelines and deployment processes
• Implementing monitoring, logging, and observability systems
• Optimizing system performance, reliability, and scalability
• Collaborating on technical decisions and architecture evolution
• Ensuring code quality, security, and operational best practices

Our Stack

• Backend: Node.js 22, TypeScript (strict), Fastify
• Database: PostgreSQL, Redis (caching, streams, sessions)
• Orchestration: Temporal (self‑hosted) for durable workflows
• Architecture: Microservices monorepo, event‑driven with CDC pattern, real‑time via Socket.io
• Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana (structured logging, metrics, alerting)
• Cloud: GCP — GKE Autopilot, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Cloud Storage, Document AI
• Infrastructure: Terraform, Helm, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Cloudflare
• AI/ML: LLM integrations (OpenAI, Anthropic, Google), GCP Document AI for document processing
• Frontend: React 19, Vite (not your primary focus, but good to know)

What You Bring

Hard Requirements

• Node.js/TypeScript Expertise: Strong proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript for building high‑performance backend services. Understanding of async patterns, streams, and Node.js performance optimization is essential.
• Event‑Driven Architecture: Deep, hands‑on experience designing and implementing event‑driven systems with messaging patterns (Kafka, RabbitMQ, GCP Pub/Sub, or Redis Streams). You understand eventual consistency, saga patterns, and can articulate trade‑offs.
• Microservices Architecture: Proven track record building, deploying, and scaling microservice‑based systems in production. You know when to split services, how to handle distributed transactions, and how to avoid common microservices pitfalls.
• GCP Hands‑On Experience: Real production experience with GCP — not just familiarity. You’ve worked with GKE, Cloud SQL, Memorystore, Cloud Storage, Secret Manager, and can navigate the GCP ecosystem confidently.

Additional Technical Skills

• Extensive experience with SQL databases (PostgreSQL preferred)
• Strong foundation in RESTful API design
• Proficiency with containerization (Docker) and orchestration (Kubernetes)
• Experience with CI/CD tools (GitHub Actions, Cloud Build, or similar)
• Infrastructure as Code with Terraform or similar tools
• Understanding of observability: structured logging, distributed tracing, metrics, and alerting
• Knowledge of API security, authentication/authorization (OAuth 2.0, JWT), and data protection
• Experience with workflow orchestration (Temporal or similar) is a strong plus

Mindset & Approach

• 0 1 Production Experience: You’ve been through production launches before and know what it takes — setting up infrastructure, handling edge cases, ensuring reliability, and managing the inevitable surprises.
• Pragmatic Perfectionism: You balance technical excellence with business velocity — you know when to refactor and when to ship quickly.
• Ownership Mentality: You’re proactive, resourceful, and accountable for your work — you don’t wait to be told what to do.
• Team Player: You collaborate well with others, give and receive feedback gracefully, and elevate those around you.
• Systems Thinking: You understand how components interact, design for reliability and maintainability, and think beyond your immediate feature.
• Clear Communication: You can explain technical decisions to non‑technical stakeholders, document your work, and participate constructively in technical discussions.
• Continuous Learner: You stay current with industry trends, experiment with new technologies, and are energized by technical challenges.

What We Offer

• Competitive salary
• Participation in our employee options programme
• On‑site in Berlin, with flexible remote work as you see fit
• High autonomy, low politics, fast decision‑making
• The chance to help build something new, with real influence on how people buy homes in Germany!