Senior Back End Engineer UK Based

About Kyra

Kyra is an enterprise influencer marketing platform working with brands like SharkNinja, Coach, H&M, Ray-Ban, and Converse. Our platform manages the full lifecycle — creator discovery, campaign management, content review, payments, analytics, and AI-powered intelligence across TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube.

The Role

We're looking for a senior backend engineer who can operate across the full stack of our infrastructure — from writing domain services to managing production deployments. You'll work alongside our engineering lead on a platform that processes millions of creator data points, runs real-time analytics, and powers AI-driven workflows. This isn't a "write endpoints and throw them over the wall" role — you'll own features end-to-end, manage infrastructure, investigate production issues, and help shape the architecture.

What You'll Actually Do

• Backend Development (50%)
  • Build and maintain domain modules in a DDD-style Node.js/TypeScript monorepo (Express, Prisma, Zod).
  • Design APIs, write Swagger documentation, manage database schemas and migrations.
  • Work with BullMQ workers for background job processing (media analysis, email outreach, data syncing).
  • Build features that span two backends — a main backend (PostgreSQL, 70+ domain modules) and an analytics backend (ClickHouse, creator intelligence).
  • Write services that integrate with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube APIs.
• Infrastructure & DevOps (30%)
  • Manage deployments across AWS ECS (production, staging/earth, mars, pluto) and Railway.
  • Maintain and improve GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines (~40 workflow files).
  • Work with Docker, Cloudflare (tunnels, CDN), and AWS services (ECS, EC2, RDS Aurora, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, CloudWatch, ALB).
  • Manage database infrastructure — PostgreSQL (RDS Aurora), ClickHouse, Redis (6 separate instances for different concerns).
  • Build and maintain preview environments (PR-based isolated deployments with auto-provisioned databases).
  • Handle production incidents, investigate performance issues, and manage monitoring (Sentry, New Relic, LogRocket).
• Team & Process (20%)
  • Review PRs, triage platform support issues, and delegate to team members.
  • Maintain deployment processes and manage production migrations safely.
  • Document API contracts, write technical specs, and maintain Postman collections.
  • Collaborate with product/PM team on feature refinement and estimation.

Required — Non-Negotiable

• 4+ years backend development with Node.js and TypeScript in production.
• Strong PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimisation, migrations (Prisma a plus).
• AWS experience — ECS or similar container orchestration, RDS, S3, Lambda. You've deployed and managed production services, not just used S3 for file uploads.
• Docker — writing Dockerfiles, multi-stage builds, container orchestration.
• CI/CD — GitHub Actions or equivalent. You've built and maintained pipelines, not just triggered them.
• Queue systems — BullMQ, SQS, or similar. Background job processing patterns.
• REST API design — Express or similar framework, Swagger/OpenAPI documentation.
• Git workflow maturity — branching strategies, code review, migration safety. You understand why you don't run --accept-data-loss on a production migration.

Strongly Preferred

• ClickHouse or columnar analytics databases — we run heavy analytics queries across millions of posts.
• Redis — caching patterns, session management, queue backing store.
• DDD / domain-driven design — our backend is structured as 70+ domain modules with explicit boundaries (repositories, services, guards, event emitters).
• Cloudflare — tunnels, DNS, CDN configuration.
• Monitoring/observability — Sentry, New Relic, LogRocket, or equivalents. You've triaged production issues, not just configured dashboards.
• SuperTokens or similar auth systems — OAuth, OTP flows, session management.

Nice to Have

• AI/LLM integrations (OpenAI API, Claude) — we use AI for content analysis, chat agents, and automated QA.
• Railway deployment experience.
• Prisma 7 specifically (we're on the latest, including schema-level features).
• Social media platform APIs (TikTok, Instagram Graph API, YouTube Data API).
• RabbitMQ (used in our discovery service alongside BullMQ).
• Elasticsearch for search.
• Monorepo tooling (pnpm workspaces, yarn workspaces, NX).
• Frontend awareness — you don't need to write React, but understanding how the frontend consumes your APIs (React Query, Zod validation on the client) helps.

What This Person Looks Like

Honestly, we're looking for someone who:

• Debugs across boundaries — when a metric shows the wrong number, you can trace it from the React component → API hook → Express controller → Prisma query → ClickHouse table and figure out where it breaks.
• Owns infrastructure without being asked — you notice the ALB health check is misconfigured before it causes an outage.
• Writes code that doesn't need babysitting — Zod schemas, proper error handling, repository patterns that other team members can follow.
• Communicates proactively — posts in Slack when deploying, writes migration plans before running them, documents API contracts for the frontend team.
• Moves fast without breaking things — we deploy to production multiple times a week. You should be comfortable with that cadence while still being careful.

Tech Stack Summary

• Technologies
• Language TypeScript (strict), Node.js 22
• Frameworks Express 4, Prisma 7, Zod
• Databases PostgreSQL (RDS Aurora), ClickHouse, Redis (6 instances)
• Queues BullMQ, RabbitMQ (discovery)
• Auth SuperTokens
• Cloud AWS (ECS, EC2, S3, Lambda, CloudFront, CloudWatch, ALB, RDS)
• Hosting AWS ECS (primary), Railway (some services)
• CI/CD GitHub Actions (~40 workflows), Docker, Cloudflare Tunnels
• Monitoring Sentry, New Relic (distributed tracing, slow SQL), LogRocket
• APIs TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, OpenAI, Claude, Stripe, SendGrid, Postmark
• Media ffmpeg, Sharp, AWS Lambda compute functions
• Repo Monorepo — pnpm + yarn + NX, 6+ apps, 70+ domain modules

Team Structure

You'll join a small, high-output engineering team (~10 people) led by the current engineering lead. The team runs async standups, weekly refinement sessions, and ships directly to production. We use GitHub Projects for tracking, Slack for communication, and Notion for documentation.

There's a strong culture of AI-assisted development (Claude Code, automated QA, Pulse auto-fix pipelines that catch ~83% of bugs automatically).

💟 Support

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