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 with sharp product judgement. 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 “wait for a fully-scoped ticket” role. You’ll take ambiguous direction, make calls, and ship features end-to-end — including deploying them yourself. We have infra already; we need someone who can operate inside it confidently, not someone who wants to rebuild it.
WHAT YOU’LL ACTUALLY DO
- Build and maintain domain modules in a DDD-style Node.js/TypeScript monorepo.
- Take vague product direction, sharpen it into a real spec, and ship a v1 — then iterate.
- Design APIs, write docs, and manage database schemas and migrations.
- Build features that span our main transactional backend and a separate analytics backend running heavy queries over creator data.
- Write services that integrate with TikTok, Instagram, and YouTube APIs.
- Work with queue workers for background job processing (media analysis, outreach, data syncing).
- Deploy your own services to our cloud infrastructure, write the migrations, watch them go out safely.
- Investigate production issues when they touch your code — trace through the observability stack to find the cause.
REQUIRED — NON-NEGOTIABLE
- 6+ years backend development with Node.js and TypeScript in production.
- Product mindset — you’ve shipped features where the brief was a paragraph, not a ticket. You ask why before how, make calls when requirements are vague, and iterate after release. You’ve sat across from non-engineers and left with a sharper problem than you walked in with.
- Strong relational database experience — schema design, query optimisation, safe migrations at scale.
- Comfortable deploying and operating your own services on a major cloud provider — containers, CI/CD pipelines, the basics of running things in production. You don’t need to be an infra specialist, but you don’t need handholding either.
- Queue-based background job processing patterns.
• REST API design and documentation.
- Git workflow maturity — branching strategies, code review, migration safety. You understand why you don’t run destructive commands on a production migration.
STRONGLY PREFERRED
- Shipped AI features to production — you know what evals are for, why prompts regress, and why “it worked in testing” isn’t enough.
- Columnar / analytics databases for heavy aggregate queries.
• In-memory caching and session stores.
- DDD or domain-driven design — explicit module boundaries, repositories, services, event-driven patterns.
- Production observability — you’ve triaged real issues, not just configured dashboards.
- OAuth, OTP, or session-based auth systems in production.
NICE TO HAVE
- Social media platform APIs (TikTok, Instagram, YouTube).
- Search infrastructure for large datasets.
• Monorepo tooling and workflows.
- Side projects, OSS contributions, or tools you’ve built for yourself that other people now use — signal that you ship for the love of shipping.
WHAT THIS PERSON LOOKS LIKE
- Holds opinions and changes them fast — you’ll ship the wrong thing sometimes and replace it a week later. That’s the job.
- Debugs across boundaries — when a metric shows the wrong number, you can trace it from the frontend component through the API layer down to the database query and figure out where it breaks.
- Writes code that doesn’t need babysitting — proper validation, error handling, and patterns other team members can follow.
- Communicates proactively — posts in Slack when deploying, writes migration p