Senior SDE - Conversations

Responsibilities:

• Design and build Node.js / Go services on critical paths — high throughput, low latency, zero tolerance for data loss
• Own systems end to end: architecture, design docs, code, tests, rollout, and production health
• Model and optimize data layers across SQL and NoSQL stores handling high read/write volumes and atomic updates
• Build queueing, caching, and rate-limiting layers that keep the platform graceful under burst traffic
• Instrument everything — logs, metrics, traces — so you know your system is healthy before anyone asks
• Debug production incidents, ship the fix, drive the post-mortem to closure
• Review code, raise the bar, and pull the engineers around you up with you.

Requirements:

• 4+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep hands-on work in Node.js and/or Go
• Queueing experience — you've designed with Pub/Sub, Kafka, RabbitMQ, Cloud Tasks, or similar, and you understand delivery semantics, ordering, and backpressure
• Complex distributed systems experience — consistency trade-offs, idempotency, fault tolerance, systems that stay correct under partial failure
• Hands-on with Redis or other in-memory data stores — caching strategies, data structures, and their failure modes
• Strong with SQL or NoSQL databases — schema design, indexing, and query optimization at high volume
• You write clear design docs and rigorous test cases as a habit, not on request
• Champion of AI-assisted engineering — you make agents produce accurate, production-quality code, fast

Technical Environment:

• Languages: Node.js (TypeScript), Go
• Storage: MongoDB, Firestore, Redis, ElasticSearch, ClickHouse
• Infra: GCP — GKE, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks
• CI/CD: GitHub Actions, Docker, Kubernetes

On AI

We're past the debate. AI is part of how we build — and we expect you to be better at it than most.

That means making agents do real work: producing code that's accurate, tested, and slop-free — fast. You know when to hand a problem to an agent and when to take the wheel. You review AI output with the same rigor as a junior engineer's PR, and you ship at a pace that engineers without this skill can't match.

If you're still copy-pasting from a chat window and hoping, this isn't the seat for you.

What you're built for

• You've solved problems nobody handed you a playbook for — ideally in a 0→1 environment where the system didn't exist until you built it
• You understand systems in depth — not just the API surface, but what happens under load, at the tail, when the network partitions
• You write design docs people actually read — clear trade-offs, honest risks, a real recommendation
• You treat test cases as part of the design, not a chore after the fact
• When production breaks at 2 AM, your first instinct is curiosity, not panic