Senior Backend Engineer (Node.js) — Real-Time Streaming Platform

About the role

You'll join the team behind the real-time backbone of a large-scale live-streaming and creator-interaction platform. The core service powers live broadcasts with private and group shows, tipping, goals, interactive toys, private messaging and video calls. All of it runs over WebSockets across a multi-instance cluster.

This is an AI-first engineering role. You won't write most of the code by hand. Instead, you'll direct AI coding agents (mainly Claude Code, sometimes Codex) to implement features, then review, challenge and harden what they produce before it ships. That only works if you understand the stack deeply: you need the experience to spot a subtle race condition or a wrong Redis pattern in code you didn't write. You own the outcome end to end, from analysis through agent-driven implementation, review and tests to deploy.

New to agent-driven development? We'll train you in our AI coding practices. The tooling is company-paid.

What you'll work on

• Real-time backend services: a horizontally scaled Socket.IO cluster (Redis adapter) with role-based room management, plus companion ping/heartbeat services that handle session, balance and stream-quality bookkeeping
• WebRTC/RTMP streaming integrations, covering stream readiness, quality monitoring, transcoding and the recording lifecycle
• High-availability patterns: Redis TTL-based leader election for hot-standby redundancy, blue/green slot deployments and emit-only worker services
• A set of in-house npm packages (Redis/Mongo stores, metrics, loggers, API SDKs), which you'll maintain and evolve, not just consume
• Infrastructure as code: Ansible on AWS EC2, Jenkins-driven deploys and a Docker Compose local dev harness
• Observability: Grafana metrics, Sentry, structured logging and Elasticsearch/Kibana report pipelines
• Production support: we're setting up an on-call rotation, and you'll be part of it and help shape how it works
• Occasional cross-stack work: Angular frontend features and PHP API touchpoints

Our stack

Node.js 22 · JavaScript (CommonJS) & TypeScript 5 · Express · Socket.IO 4 · MongoDB / Mongoose 8 · Redis (pub/sub, Lua scripting, leases) · WebRTC / RTMP · PM2 · Docker & Docker Compose · Ansible · AWS (EC2, Secrets Manager) · Jenkins · Grafana · Sentry · ELK · Mocha + Chai · ESLint

What we're looking for

• 5+ years of production Node.js backend experience, and comfort in both plain JavaScript and TypeScript codebases
• Deep experience with WebSockets/Socket.IO and event-driven architectures
• Redis beyond caching (pub/sub, atomic operations/Lua, TTL patterns) and solid MongoDB experience
• Experience running multi-instance services on Linux: process managers, health checks, metrics, graceful shutdown, logs and networking basics
• Strong code-review instincts: you can read unfamiliar code critically, catch concurrency bugs, missing edge cases and bad abstractions, and explain why they're wrong
• Self-sufficiency: you can take a ticket from analysis to a tested, deployed change without hand-holding

Nice to have

• Hands-on experience with AI coding agents (Claude Code, Codex or similar), including writing precise specs and validating generated code
• Live streaming, WebRTC or RTMP domain experience
• Ansible, AWS, Jenkins or other IaC/CD exposure
• Angular or another modern SPA framework
• PHP/Laravel familiarity
• Experience designing shared libraries or SDKs for internal reuse

Why this role

• Work the way the industry is heading: agent-driven development, with human engineering judgment where it matters
• Real time, real money: live payments and stateful sessions, where bugs show up in seconds rather than in tomorrow's batch report
• Full ownership of the whole vertical: backend, shared packages, infrastructure and dashboards
• A small team of four engineers, where you report directly to the team's engineering lead