Find a job 
Featured Companies 
Featured Universities 
For Companies At a Glance
- Tasks: Build a robust backend for a fast-growing AI music platform and ensure reliable media delivery.
- Company: Join an exciting AI music startup with over 100k users and $7M+ in funding.
- Benefits: Competitive salary, dynamic work environment, and opportunities for rapid career growth.
- Why this job: Be part of a mission to make music creation universal and impactful.
- Qualifications: Strong SQL skills, experience in database migration, and API design expertise.
- Other info: Collaborative team culture focused on ownership, speed, and continuous learning.
The predicted salary is between 60000 - 80000 £ per year.
About the Company
At Heart Mind Talent, we’re partnering with an exciting, fast-growing AI music startup to bring on exceptional talent. Imagine a world where everyone around you creates music – together, in real time. That’s the future this team began building just six months ago. Since then, over 100k+ users have created more than 1M+ songs – from shower singers to seasoned artists, including producers behind global names like A$AP Rocky. Their platform empowers creators to turn ideas into professional-grade music in seconds, with as much control as they want. Backed by $7M+ in funding from leading investors, this is a team on a mission to make music creation as universal and engaging as music listening. They’re a small, talent-dense group based in London, operating with high ownership, rapid velocity, and low-ego collaboration. Think specialist generalists who work hard, learn fast, and ship relentlessly. This is a team that cares deeply about what they’re building and is in it for the long run.
About the Role
As the product scales, so does the need for a robust backend. You’ll play a key role in building the foundation that supports growth from 100k users to millions. This includes designing relational schemas, leading the migration from non-relational systems, and ensuring payments, media delivery, and deployment are reliable at scale. This role is ideal for someone who thinks in data models, cares about production reliability, and ships with both speed and discipline.
What You’ll Do
- Drive the full migration from Non-Relational to Relational Database: Canonical relational schema design, migration strategy, dual-writes, backfills, reconciliation, and zero-data-loss cutover.
- Design clean REST APIs for high concurrency, real-time collaboration, and cross-platform clients (web + mobile).
- Own the payments backbone end-to-end: Stripe + RevenueCat. Web-hooks, entitlement reconciliation, edge-case coverage (upgrades, downgrades, refunds, cross-platform parity), and automated billing tests.
- Build reliable media upload, processing, and delivery at scale: Signed URLs, CDN caching strategy, transcoding pipelines with retries and observability.
- Set up and own deployment and operational excellence: Better CI/CD with staged deploys and rollbacks, structured logging, tracing, SLOs, and alerting tied to user impact.
- Keep media streaming reliable and evolve it into a reusable platform capability, including text and audio streaming.
- Establish the backend primitives for real-time collaboration and high concurrency as we move toward multiplayer features.
What We’re Looking For
- Strong relational schema design. Deep SQL experience with normalisation, indexing, migrations, and schemas that hold up as the product and team grow.
- Database migration experience. Can plan and execute a zero-data-loss migration to a relational database, including backfills, reconciliation, and rollback.
- API design for high concurrency. Designs clean APIs with idempotency, pagination, rate limiting, retries, and safe versioning. Thinks in contracts that work across web, mobile, and future clients.
- Payments and entitlements integrity. Has built or owned a payments backbone where revenue state and entitlements are always correct. Stripe and RevenueCat experience strongly preferred.
- Production ownership mindset. Strong instincts for failure modes, graceful degradation, incident response, and rollback discipline.
- DevOps and deployment. Docker, CI/CD, sane environments. Makes deploys repeatable and safe for the whole team.
- Media pipeline experience. Upload, processing, and fast global delivery via signed URLs and CDN caching. Understands media-heavy performance bottlenecks.
- First-principles thinker. You challenge what doesn’t make sense, but stay humble and update your thinking when new evidence appears.
- Ownership + high velocity + low ego. You care about outcomes after release, not just merges. You ship fast and do whatever it takes for the team.
Nice-to-Haves
- Experience with search-oriented databases (e.g., ElasticSearch) or vector databases (e.g., ChromaDB) for text and semantic search.
- Real-time foundations with WebSockets, SSE, or CRDT/collaboration-aware system design.
- Server-side rendering knowledge (e.g., Next.js) to support the frontend team during migration.
- Experience with analytics and logging pipelines (e.g., PostHog, Axiom, or more enterprise-ready options).
Founding Backend Engineer employer: Heart Mind Talent
Contact Detail:
Heart Mind Talent Recruiting Team
StudySmarter Expert Advice 🤫
We think this is how you could land Founding Backend Engineer
✨Tip Number 1
Network like a pro! Reach out to people in the industry, attend meetups, and connect with potential colleagues on LinkedIn. You never know who might have the inside scoop on job openings or can put in a good word for you.
✨Tip Number 2
Show off your skills! Create a portfolio or GitHub repository showcasing your projects, especially those related to backend engineering. This gives potential employers a taste of what you can do and sets you apart from the crowd.
✨Tip Number 3
Prepare for interviews by practising common technical questions and coding challenges. Use platforms like LeetCode or HackerRank to sharpen your skills. Remember, confidence is key, so get comfortable talking through your thought process!
✨Tip Number 4
Apply directly through our website! It’s often the quickest way to get noticed. Tailor your application to highlight how your experience aligns with the role, and don’t forget to follow up after submitting to show your enthusiasm.
We think you need these skills to ace Founding Backend Engineer
Some tips for your application 🫡
Show Your Passion for Music Tech: When writing your application, let your love for music and technology shine through! Share any personal projects or experiences that connect you to the world of music creation, as this will resonate with our mission.
Highlight Your Backend Skills: Make sure to emphasise your experience with relational databases and backend development. We want to see your expertise in SQL, API design, and production ownership, so don’t hold back on the details!
Tailor Your Application: Customise your application to reflect how your skills align with our needs. Mention specific projects where you've tackled challenges similar to those we face, like database migrations or building reliable media pipelines.
Apply Through Our Website: We encourage you to apply directly through our website. It’s the best way for us to receive your application and ensures you’re considered for this exciting opportunity to join our team!
How to prepare for a job interview at Heart Mind Talent
✨Know Your Tech Inside Out
Make sure you’re well-versed in relational schema design and SQL. Brush up on your database migration strategies, especially zero-data-loss migrations. Be ready to discuss your past experiences with these technologies and how they can apply to the role.
✨Showcase Your API Design Skills
Prepare to talk about your experience designing clean REST APIs. Think about examples where you implemented idempotency, pagination, and rate limiting. Being able to articulate your thought process behind API contracts will impress the interviewers.
✨Demonstrate Your Production Ownership Mindset
Be ready to discuss how you handle failure modes and incident responses. Share specific instances where you ensured production reliability and how you approached rollback discipline. This shows that you care about outcomes beyond just coding.
✨Emphasise Team Collaboration
Since this role values low-ego collaboration, highlight your experiences working in team settings. Talk about how you’ve contributed to a team’s success and how you adapt to feedback. This will resonate well with their culture of ownership and high velocity.