Senior Backend Engineer

This role is no longer open

We are not accepting applications for this position at the moment. The description below is kept for reference. See our current openings, or send us your CV at contact@stepto.net and we will get in touch when something similar opens up.

About the Role

We're looking for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to design and build scalable backend systems for complex, data-intensive applications. You'll work across distributed services, high-performance pipelines, and event-driven architectures that need to hold up under real production load.

You'll typically embed directly with a client engineering team, owning services end to end, from schema design in PostgreSQL through caching strategy in Redis to the observability that tells you when something's about to break.

We care more about engineering judgment than any single framework. You should be able to reason about consistency, latency, and failure modes, and explain those tradeoffs clearly to both engineers and stakeholders.

What You'll Do

• Design and build backend services in TypeScript/Node.js, with an emphasis on correctness and maintainability at scale.
• Model and evolve PostgreSQL schemas for data-intensive, high-throughput applications.
• Use Redis for caching, rate limiting, and real-time data patterns.
• Design event-driven and distributed-systems architectures that degrade gracefully under failure.
• Own service reliability: monitoring, alerting, and incident response for the systems you build.
• Collaborate with frontend, DevOps, and AI engineers to ship end-to-end features.

What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with production experience in TypeScript/Node.js.
• Strong hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, including query optimization and schema design.
• Experience with Redis or a comparable in-memory data store.
• Practical experience with distributed-systems concepts, queues, eventual consistency, idempotency.
• A track record of owning services in production, not just building prototypes.
• Excellent written and verbal English communication skills for direct client collaboration.

What We Offer

• Remote-first: work from anywhere in Serbia. The Belgrade office is optional.
• You'll work alongside engineers with 5–15 years of experience. No babysitting, just craft.
• Top-of-market salary for Serbia, paid in EUR, reviewed annually and tied to your impact.
• €1,500/year learning budget for conferences, courses, and books.
• 25 days PTO, flexible hours, and a culture that respects your time outside work.