Back End Engineer

About the role We are a small, focused engineering team building reliable backend systems that interface with real-world hardware. While our system core is effectively CRUD the environment is far from trivial. We operate cloud infrastructure on AWS, integrate with real hardware components, support live video streaming for new geospatial based systems.

This is an onsite role (Cape Town) for an intermediate backend engineer (3–5 years experience) who cares deeply about testing, iteration & systems engineering.

What you'll be doing

• Building and maintaining backend services as we scale out our feature set & customer base
• Developing and debugging our core API platform
• Writing and maintaining automated tests (unit + integration)
• Investigating and resolving production issues
• Contributing to infrastructure-as-code using AWS CDK
• Improving observability, logging, and system validation
• Reviewing pull requests and maintaining engineering standards
• Documenting systems and decisions as you learn and contribute
• Building real-time geospatial systems

Working with

• AWS
• Postgres
• Valkey
• MQTT
• DJI
• WebRTC & live streaming
• C++, Python, Go, Typescript, Nodejs

Required Technical skills

• 3+ years of professional backend engineering experience
• Strong TypeScript or Python experience
• Experience building and debugging API-driven systems
• PostgreSQL experience
• Strong Linux proficiency (daily CLI usage, logs, system inspection)
• Experience writing meaningful automated tests
• Comfortable debugging production issues
• Understanding of cloud-hosted distributed systems

Nice to have

• Experience with AWS & or CDK
• Experience with Redis & messaging systems (MQTT, SQS)
• Experience with streaming technologies (WebRTC, RTSP, RTMP)
• Exposure to ML system integration
• Experience working in small teams or startup environments
• Experience building tooling and automation

Qualifications

• Bachelors or Masters Degree in Engineering, Computer Science
• 3+ years of professional experience in backend engineering.
• Certifications and startup experience are welcome but not required.

We Value

• Strong problem solving skills
• Voracious learner
• Deep understanding & debugging ability over surface-level shipping
• Engineers who improve systems, not just complete tickets
• Clear communication & written documentation
• Asking questions early and documenting what you learn
• Calm, methodical handling of production issues
• Practical solutions over over-engineering