Senior Software Engineer (Backend)

About AppNation

We build AI-powered mobile apps that reach millions of users worldwide.

Since 2021, AppNation has been creating products across AI, productivity, and mobile experiences. Our apps, including Genie, Translate AI, and Arch, have reached 90M+ users globally and ranked among the top apps in 30+ countries.

We are a team of builders, designers, and engineers who move fast, take ownership, and create products used by millions.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Senior Software Engineer (Backend) to design, build, and evolve the backend systems behind our AI-powered mobile apps.

You’ll work on production systems that power mobile experiences used by millions of users, building reliable APIs, data-intensive services, asynchronous workflows, and integrations with AI and third-party platforms.

This is a hands-on engineering role with strong ownership across system design, implementation, testing, performance, and production reliability. You’ll also help raise the engineering bar through technical decisions, code reviews, mentoring, and better development practices.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain scalable backend services and APIs using Node.js and TypeScript.

• Own backend features from technical design and implementation through testing, deployment, observability, and production validation.

• Design reliable distributed and asynchronous workflows using message brokers, queues, background workers, and event-driven patterns.

• Build AI-powered product capabilities and integrate backend systems with LLMs, AI providers, and internal AI platforms.

• Design and optimize relational data models using PostgreSQL and MySQL, including indexing, query optimization, migrations, transactions, and concurrency considerations.

• Use Redis effectively for caching, distributed coordination, rate limiting, queues, and other appropriate workloads.

• Design systems with failure in mind, applying appropriate timeout, retry, idempotency, fallback, backpressure, and graceful-degradation strategies.

• Write comprehensive unit and integration tests and contribute to end-to-end testing of critical product flows.

• Investigate production issues using logs, metrics, traces, and profiling; identify root causes and implement lasting improvements.

• Contribute to architectural decisions, technical design reviews, code reviews, and engineering standards.

• Work effectively with Docker and containerized environments and understand how backend services operate on Kubernetes and cloud infrastructure.

• Collaborate closely with mobile, AI, product, and infrastructure teams to turn product requirements into reliable technical solutions.

• Use modern AI-assisted development tools effectively for coding, testing, debugging, research, and engineering productivity without compromising correctness or code quality.

• Mentor other engineers and help improve engineering practices across the team.

What We’re Looking For

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with strong hands-on ownership of production backend systems.

• Strong production experience with Node.js and TypeScript.

• Strong understanding of backend fundamentals, including HTTP, REST APIs, authentication, authorization, concurrency, networking, and application security.

• Strong experience with relational databases such as PostgreSQL and MySQL, including schema design, indexing, query execution and optimization, transactions, locking, migrations, and data integrity.

• Strong experience with Redis and a solid understanding of caching strategies, invalidation, and appropriate in-memory data patterns.

• Hands-on experience designing distributed systems and reasoning about scalability, reliability, consistency, concurrency, and failure modes.

• Production experience with asynchronous and event-driven systems using Kafka, RabbitMQ, Pub/Sub, or similar technologies.

• Strong understanding of patterns such as idempotency, retries, timeouts, eventual consistency, message delivery semantics, and failure recovery.

• Strong testing discipline, including unit and integration testing, mocking, testable design, and automated quality checks.

• Hands-on experience with Docker and familiarity with Kubernetes concepts and containerized production environments.

• Working knowledge of Google Cloud Platform and fundamental cloud concepts such as compute, networking, IAM, managed databases, storage, and observability.

• Experience debugging and improving production systems using metrics, logs, traces, and other observability signals.

• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows and modern software delivery practices.

• Experience building AI-powered backend capabilities and integrating applications with LLMs, AI APIs, or AI platforms.

• Comfortable using AI-assisted development tools as part of the daily engineering workflow while independently validating architecture, correctness, security, and maintainability.

• Strong ownership, technical judgment, communication skills, and the ability to make pragmatic engineering decisions in a fast-moving product environment.

Why AppNation?

• Build and scale products reaching millions of users globally.

• Work with talented people in a fast-moving AI-first environment.

• Take ownership and see your impact directly in the products you build.

• Grow quickly with opportunities to lead projects and shape technical decisions.

• Enjoy competitive compensation and benefits, including private health insurance, meal and commute support, relocation support, and flexible working options.