{"id":3293222,"url":"https://alion.io/job/iclosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed","title":"Principal Backend / Performance / Database Engineer @iClosed","company":{"id":182446,"name":"Iclosed","domain":"iclosed.io","url":"https://alion.io/company/iclosed","size_band":null,"is_staffing_agency":false,"employer_type":"direct","is_intermediary":false,"listed_via":null,"ats_vendor":null,"truth_index":null},"role":"Backend","role_family":"Backend","seniority":"lead","employment_type":"full_time","work_mode":"remote","remote_scope":"stated_countries","remote_scope_basis":"posting_text","remote_working_hours":null,"hiring_geo_confidence":"inferred","locations":[],"countries":[],"hiring_countries":["PK"],"hiring_countries_total":1,"salary":null,"salary_estimate":{"min_usd":96000,"max_usd":243000,"period":"year","method":"global_role_seniority_cell","sample_n":2257},"experience_years_min":5,"visa_sponsorship":false,"relocation_package":false,"has_equity":false,"technologies":[{"name":"Amazon ECS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EKS","optional":false},{"name":"Amazon EventBridge","optional":false},{"name":"AWS","optional":false},{"name":"Datadog","optional":false},{"name":"DynamoDB","optional":false},{"name":"Memcached","optional":false},{"name":"Mongoose","optional":false},{"name":"MySQL","optional":false},{"name":"Node JS","optional":false},{"name":"PostgreSQL","optional":false},{"name":"Prisma","optional":false},{"name":"Redis","optional":false},{"name":"TypeScript","optional":false},{"name":"WebSockets","optional":false},{"name":"JavaScript","optional":true},{"name":"Kubernetes","optional":true},{"name":"Sentry","optional":true},{"name":"SLI/SLO/SLA","optional":true},{"name":"Socket.IO","optional":true}],"status":"live","first_seen_at":"2026-10-24T18:23:43Z","employer_posted_date":null,"last_verified_at":"2026-10-24T18:23:43Z","board_verified":false,"closed_at":null,"days_open":8,"trust":{"level":"not_scored","repost_count":null,"flags":[],"days_open":8},"description":"Remote (Pakistan preferred) · Full-time 🧭 About the roleiClosed.io is a SaaS platform for sales and marketing teams, scaling to millions of users. This role sits in our Performance Team and owns the performance and scalability of our Node.js/TypeScript backend services and data layer.\nWe believe the biggest gains come from design, not just tuning: matching each store to its access pattern, moving work off the critical path, and drawing service boundaries that scale cleanly. You'll solve the problem in front of you, then shape the architecture so whole classes of problems never come up.\nThis is a senior individual contributor role with no direct reports, high autonomy and significant technical influence.\n🔀 How the work splitsYou'll own performance across three connected areas, with genuine depth expected in both system design and data-layer internals:\n\nDesign: how a request flows, what runs synchronously, where state lives, and what happens when a dependency is slow.\n\nDiagnosis: reading traces, execution plans and metrics to find the real cause rather than the obvious one.\n\nPrevention: instrumentation, review standards and regression gates, so issues are caught long before they reach customers.\n\n🎯 What you'll do\nLead the design of high-traffic flows end to end, keeping them fast under load and resilient when dependencies fail.\n\nDiagnose latency across the full request path using traces, execution plans and metrics.\n\nMatch each workload to the right data store, and document the reasoning.\n\nScale reads and writes through caching, replicas, partitioning, sharding and queue-buffered writes.\n\nBuild reliable background processing on SQS and EventBridge with idempotency, retries, dead letters and backpressure.\n\nEliminate N+1 queries and chatty data access, including inefficient queries generated by ORMs such as Prisma and Mongoose.\n\nOwn data-layer capacity planning and cost per request alongside latency.\n\nSet engineering standards: design and query review for hot paths, migration standards, CI regression gates, and load testing at production-realistic volumes.\n\nReview architecture proposals from feature teams, and write the design docs others build from.\n\n🧑💻 Who we're looking forRequired\n5+ years building and operating production backend systems, with 3+ where performance and scale were a named part of your job.\n\nPerformance ownership of a multi-tenant SaaS product under real load.\n\nSystems you designed yourself, including the alternatives you rejected and the tradeoffs you accepted.\n\nA concrete track record: a problem you diagnosed, its root cause, your fix, and the before-and-after numbers.\n\nStrong system design judgement across caching, sharding, CQRS, queues, real-time delivery (WebSockets/SSE), autoscaling, high availability and resilience patterns. Knowing when not to use one matters more to us than listing its benefits.\n\nReal depth in at least two of PostgreSQL/MySQL, MongoDB, DynamoDB and Redis, with working competence in the rest.\n\nProduction ownership of Node.js/TypeScript services, and a solid understanding of how ORMs and ODMs such as Prisma and Mongoose generate queries.\n\nHands-on Datadog APM and tracing experience (or equivalent), plus production experience on AWS (ECS/EKS), including the cost behaviour of managed data services.\n\nClear writing: design docs a team can build from and an executive can follow.\n\n🗄️ Data layer depthNobody is deep in all four engines, and we'd rather you tell us where you are. Across your areas of depth, we expect you to reason about:\n\nRelational (PostgreSQL, MySQL): execution plans as routine, composite and partial indexes and their write cost, locking, isolation levels, connection pooling and replica lag.\n\nDocument (MongoDB): embedding vs referencing, shard key selection, aggregation performance and working set sizing.\n\nKey-value: access-pattern-first modelling, partition keys, hot partition avoidance, secondary indexes and capacity cost.\n\nIn-memory cache (Redis/Memcached): caching patterns, key design, eviction and TTL, and system behaviour when the cache is cold or unavailable.\n\nAcross engines: consistency boundaries, dual-write problems, and recognising when a query problem is really an application design problem.\n\n🌟 What success looks like\n\nDiagnosis: latency is attributed to real causes with evidence, and per-tenant investigations end with clear answers.\n\nDesign: critical paths have documented designs others can reason about, store selection is deliberate and written down, and queues behave predictably under load.\n\nMeasurable improvement: meaningful latency reduction on the highest-cost paths, with before-and-after numbers, and cost per request trending down.\n\nPrevention: design and query review is standard practice for hot paths, regressions are caught before merge, and migration standards are followed across teams.\n\nPartnership: feature teams bring you proposals early because you make them better, not slower.\n\n➕ Nice to haveAPM, error tracking and database performance tooling using tools like Datadog and Sentry · event streaming or messaging at scale · real-time delivery and fan-out at scale (Socket.IO) · third-party integrations where latency is outside your control · noisy-neighbour and tenant isolation · load testing tools and building that capability · SLOs and error budgets · infrastructure as code\n🚫 What this role is not\n\nNot a DBA role. Backups, patching and routine operations sit with DevOps. You set the performance requirements.\n\nNot feature work. Your output is latency removed and regressions prevented.\n\nNot a management role today. Leading the function as it grows is an open conversation.\n\n💎 Why join\nShape the performance function and its priorities from day one.\n\nHave direct influence on architecture across every engineering team.\n\nWork on a polyglot stack at real scale.\n\n📋 Practicalities\n\nLocation: Remote (Pakistan preferred)\n\nType: Full-time, permanent\n\nLevel: Senior individual contributor, no direct reports\n\nCompensation: Market competitive\n\nOn-call: Part of the escalation rota\n\nSalary: Market CompetitiveOriginally posted on Himalayas","description_format":"text","description_chars":6105,"description_truncated":false,"requirements":{"experience_years_min":5,"management_years_min":null,"team_size_min":null,"manages_managers":false,"education":null,"security_clearance":false,"languages":[]},"benefits":[],"hiring_locations":[{"name":"Pakistan","iso":"PK","kind":"country"}],"hiring_excludes":[],"relocation_offered":false,"industries":["Scheduling & Booking Software"],"lifecycle":[{"event":"open","at":"2026-10-26T20:30:00Z"}],"visa":[],"liveness":{"score":81,"band":"hot","label":"Hiring now","p_open":1,"p_active":0.81,"p_room":1,"age_days":8,"expected_fill_days":28,"reasons":["seen:8","win:early"],"computed_at":"2026-11-02T06:13:15Z"},"pay":null,"html_url":"https://alion.io/job/iclosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed","json_url":"https://alion.io/job/iclosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed.json","meta":{"generated_at":"2026-11-02T17:05:03Z","cache_seconds":300,"methodology":"https://alion.io/methodology","terms":"https://alion.io/terms","contact":"https://alion.io/contact","api":"https://alion.io/developers","about":"Alion is a live layer of people, companies and AI agents: who they are, whether they are real and active right now, what they do and how to work with them, readable by people and by agents and paid per call.","catalog":"https://alion.io/catalog.json","usage":{"tier":"crawler_verified","counted_by":"address","units_charged":1,"used_today":23799,"day_limit":null,"remaining_today":null,"minute_limit":300,"resets_at":"2026-11-03T00:00:00Z"}},"offers":[{"id":"company.slices","title":"One company in depth, by slice","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002,"plus_per_slice":{"credits":0.05,"usd":0.005}},"unit":"per company, plus each slice with data","note":"the employer in depth","call":{"mcp_tool":"get_company","arguments":{"id":182446},"rest":"https://alion.io/mcp/rest/get_company?id=182446"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.slices&for=job%2Ficlosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed"},{"id":"market.stats","title":"A market slice: pay, demand and time to fill","status":"live","price":{"credits":1,"usd":0.1},"unit":"per slice","note":"pay, demand and time to fill for this role and place","call":{"mcp_tool":"market_stats"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=market.stats&for=job%2Ficlosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed"},{"id":"job.search","title":"Open jobs by role, technology, place, pay and visa","status":"live","price":{"credits":0.02,"usd":0.002},"unit":"per posting in a list","note":"similar open postings","call":{"mcp_tool":"search_jobs"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=job.search&for=job%2Ficlosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed"},{"id":"company.verify","title":"Is this company real and active right now","status":"pilot","price":null,"unit":"per company","request":{"url":"https://alion.io/catalog/request","method":"POST","body":"{\"offer\": \"company.verify\", \"for\": \"job/iclosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed\", \"note\": \"what you need it for\"}"},"human":"https://alion.io/catalog?offer=company.verify&for=job%2Ficlosed-principal-backend-performance-database-engineer-iclosed"}],"agent":{"mcp":"https://alion.io/mcp/jobs","mcp_open":"https://alion.io/mcp/open","next":[{"tool":"get_job","arguments":{"id":3293222}},{"tool":"search_jobs","arguments":{"company":"iclosed.io","detail":"compact"}},{"tool":"match_people","arguments":{"job_id":3293222},"note":"people open to offers who fit this vacancy"}],"note":"The same data through MCP tools: https://alion.io/mcp/open needs no sign-in (compact searches, postings, people); https://alion.io/mcp with an Alion account has everything. Docs: https://alion.io/developers"}}