Senior Backend Engineer

## About the Role We're seeking a Senior Backend Engineer to join our growing team. You'll work on a sophisticated Django-based platform that handles complex networking features, real-time notifications, job matching, and project collaboration. This is an opportunity to work on a production system serving real users, with modern cloud infrastructure and interesting technical challenges. ## About the Company Projekt Network is a professional networking and collaboration platform connecting tradespeople and businesses in the construction and skilled trades industry. It combines a profession social network, a job marketplace, and a project-portfolio showcase in one product, shipped across three coordinated surfaces: a Next.js web app, native iOS/Android apps, and a shared Django cloud API — all hosted cloud-native Google Cloud. We're currently growing quickly and looking to expand our engineering team. ## Key Responsibilities ### Platform Performance & Optimization - Profile backend, database, and API performance; find bottlenecks before users feel them. - Reduce p95 latency site-wide. - Implement caching layers, smarter indexing, async offload, and rate limiting. - Build and maintain monitoring dashboards (logs, traces, metrics) and add latency-regression gates to CI. ### Scalability Architecture - Evaluate and re-architect components to sustain 100× current peak load. - Lead decisions on horizontal scaling, autoscaling tuning, and monolith-vs-service boundaries as the system matures. - Own infrastructure-as-code and the deployment pipeline. ### Reliability & Uptime - Own SLAs/SLOs for latency, throughput, and availability, targeting a 99.9% uptime SLA. - Design HA database + disaster recovery, set tight alerting thresholds, and keep on-call lightweight and predictable. - Keep the platform stable through growth spikes, ad campaigns, and influencer pushes. ### Database & Storage Optimization - Tune PostgreSQL (Cloud SQL) for high concurrency — query plans, indexing, connection pooling, caching strategies. - Future-proof data models for rapid feature expansion. ### Security & Infrastructure Hygiene - Harden our GCP footprint. - Conduct periodic audits of access, IAM permissions, secrets, and backups, and keep secret management and CI security scanning healthy. ## Technical Stack ### Core Technologies - Python 3.12+ - Django 5.0 & Django REST Framework - PostgreSQL - Docker ### Cloud & Infrastructure - Google Cloud Platform - GitHub Actions for CI/CD ### Additional Tools & Services - Clerk - Expo ## What We're Looking For ### Required Experience - 5+ years of professional backend development experience - Strong proficiency in Python and Django (5+ years) - Experience building and maintaining REST APIs - Solid understanding of PostgreSQL and database optimization - Understanding of Docker and containerization - Production experience with Google Cloud Platform services - Experience with authentication systems and JWT