Backend Engineer

## About the role We are looking for a Backend Engineer to own the server-side infrastructure that powers Lens. You will build and maintain the APIs, services, and data pipelines that support real-time IQS scoring, article ingestion, and institutional integrations. Reliability and throughput are critical — credibility infrastructure cannot go down. ## Responsibilities - Design, build, and maintain RESTful APIs consumed by web, mobile, Chrome Extension, and institutional partners - Build and maintain server-side services supporting real-time IQS scoring pipelines - Implement authentication, rate limiting, API key management, and enterprise SLA tiers - Own backend integrations with third-party news sources, data providers, and ML services - Build webhook infrastructure and event-driven processing pipelines - Monitor service health, write observability tooling, and respond to incidents - Collaborate with the ML team on API contracts for IQS model inference ## Requirements - 3+ years of professional backend development experience - Strong proficiency in Node.js (TypeScript) or Python - Experience designing and operating production REST APIs - Familiarity with relational databases (PostgreSQL, SQLite) and query optimization - Understanding of authentication patterns (JWT, API keys, OAuth) - Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Vercel/Railway equivalent) - Strong debugging and systems-thinking skills ## Nice to have - Experience building API products with metered billing (Stripe, usage-based pricing) - Familiarity with LLM API integration (Anthropic, OpenAI) - Experience serving ML inference in production ## Tech Stack - Node.js / TypeScript - PostgreSQL - SQLite - REST APIs - Vercel / Railway