Senior Backend Engineer
First seen by Alion on Sep 7, 2026.
Total Experience : 8 - 10 years
The Opportunity :
Help turn complex foodservice information and rules into reliable production behaviour. MenuWise is rebuilding a proven platform for its next generation, and this role will convert established product, domain and architecture foundations into TypeScript/Node.js backend capability that foodservice professionals can rely on.
What You Will Work On :
- Build and maintain backend services and product capabilities in TypeScript on the Node.js runtime.
- Work in the established NestJS backend environment and apply its modular service patterns appropriately.
- Own substantial backend work from requirement interpretation through implementation, testing, release, production support and improvement.
- Implement interconnected rules, calculations, validation and state behaviour across costing, nutrition, allergens, supplier-product relationships, menus, procurement, compliance and related capabilities.
- Design and maintain production APIs, request/response contracts, validation, error behaviour, authentication/authorisation and service integrations.
- Work with relational schemas, constraints, joins, transactions, indexes, migrations, query behaviour and performance.
- Use caching, background jobs, queues or event-driven processing where appropriate, including failure handling, retries and recovery.
- Design proportionate automated tests that protect important rules, calculations, workflows and integrations from regression.
- Use evidence to diagnose production defects, performance issues and reliability problems, and document implementation behaviour and significant technical decisions clearly.
- Work with Product, analysis, frontend engineering, data/ML specialists and domain experts to understand the problem before implementing the solution.
What You Need to Succeed :
- Strong recent hands-on production backend engineering with TypeScript and Node.js.
- Evidence of independently owning substantial backend features, services or systems in production.
- Ability to implement complex business or domain logic accurately, including rules, calculations, validation, workflows or state transitions.
- Strong production API and integration engineering.
- Strong relational-database engineering, including schema/integrity, transactions, queries and performance reasoning.
- Testing discipline, production debugging and reliability thinking.
- Clear written technical communication and the ability to work from structured requirements and specifications.
- Experience with a structured backend framework and the ability to explain service organisation, dependency management, validation, authentication boundaries and testability.
Useful & Transferable Experience :
- Substantial production NestJS experience.
- Direct PostgreSQL experience.
- Redis or Valkey, queues, background processing or event-driven systems.
- AWS or comparable cloud delivery experience.
- MikroORM or another mature ORM.
- Experience in rules-heavy SaaS, ERP, procurement, supply chain, fintech, healthcare, compliance, integrations or another operational domain.
How We Work :
- TypeScript-first engineering with a strong emphasis on correctness, maintainability and explicit domain meaning.
- Documentation-first working : architecture, specifications, domain models and significant technical decisions are treated as durable product assets.
- Structured milestone-based delivery rather than a general Scrum or sprint-based operating model.
- Research, modelling, design and specification before implementation where appropriate.
- AI-assisted engineering workflows combined with professional judgement and verification.
- Long-term ownership and continuous improvement rather than delivery ending at initial release.
About MenuWise :
MenuWise is the Culinary Intelligence Platform for Foodservice. Drawing on more than twenty years of foodservice expertise, MenuWise interprets, enriches and connects supplier products, ingredients, recipes, menus, nutrition, allergens, costing, procurement and compliance information into trusted operational knowledge. The platform helps foodservice organisations make informed culinary decisions with confidence. MenuWise has an established customer base across Australia and New Zealand and is rebuilding its proven platform for the next decade of growth.
Skills
TypeScript, NestJS, Node.js, API Integration, PostgreSQL, ORM, Backend Architecture