Job Title

Senior Full-Stack Engineer Backend-Heavy · Remote (India) · Full-Time ContractAt a GlanceLocation: Remote (India)Employment Type: Independent Contractor (Full-time)Compensation: ₹25 LPA base (negotiable for exceptional candidates); up to ₹15 LPA variable (₹40 LPA target total compensation). Exceptional performance may be rewarded with additional spot bonuses (up to ~₹50 LPA total compensation in some cases)Payment: Every two weeks via bank depositExperience Level: Senior Full-Stack Engineering, backend-heavy (typically 7+ years; exceptional candidates considered with strong evidence of production ownership)About the RoleWe're hiring a senior full-stack engineer to take ownership of core backend services and infrastructure on Secret Desires AI, a high-traffic multimodal AI companionship platform serving thousands of paying subscribers across text, image, video, and real-time voice.This is a high-agency, execution-heavy role with direct impact on platform reliability, performance, and cost efficiency. You'll work primarily on backend systems in a Node.js/Express/MongoDB stack with a Next.js frontend, collaborating asynchronously with Product, QA, and AI engineers, and reporting to the Lead Developer.The center of gravity is backend architecture, database performance, and service reliability. You'll touch the frontend where it matters, but the hardest problems and highest-leverage work are on the server side.This role is ideal for engineers who have shipped and operated high-traffic production systems at scale and care deeply about correctness, uptime, and shipping with confidence.What You'll OwnA defined set of backend services and system areas, including their correctness, performance, and reliability in production. You won't own all of these simultaneously — areas will be scoped and prioritized with the Lead Developer based on what matters most. Examples include:Backend service boundaries. We're decomposing a monolithic Express backend into well-bounded services. You'll contribute to designing service contracts, introducing message queuing, and managing transitions on a live system.Database performance. MongoDB at scale — indexing strategies, aggregation pipelines, query optimization. We're migrating from an ORM layer to the native MongoClient driver. You should understand why that matters and how to do it safely.AI service reliability. We integrate multiple external providers for chat, image generation, video, and real-time voice. You'll help own reliability, latency optimization, and fallback routing across these integrations.Observability. You'll own instrumentation for the systems you ship — dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing that give the team confidence in production.Cost-aware engineering. Infrastructure decisions have a cost dimension. You'll be expected to think about efficiency and spend as part of architecture choices, not as an afterthought.Ownership here means: you ship it, you instrument it, and you help ensure it behaves correctly in the real world.What Success Looks LikeIn your first 3–6 months, success is demonstrated by outcomes such as:Measurable improvements in reliability, latency, or error rates across the systems you ownFaster detection of regressions or user-impacting issues through better instrumentation and alertingAt least one meaningful contribution to the monolith-to-services migration — a cleanly extracted boundary, a safer rollout patternReduced operational risk through clearer contracts, simpler system boundaries, or improved deployment confidenceEstablishing reusable patterns (not just one-off fixes) that make the system easier to debug, operate, and evolveSuccess in this role is not about shipping more code. It's about making the platform steadier, more predictable, and easier to work with over time.How We WorkIndividual Contributor (IC) role: no people management; your impact comes from what you own and shipAsync-first: with some overlap with US hours as needed (kept predictable and discussed upfront)Direct access to leadership: you'll work closely with the Lead Developer and cross-functional partnersBias for clarity: small diffs, fast deploys, while maintaining a strong systems design visionHigh trust environment: ownership comes with real decision-making authority, including the responsibility to flag riskRequirementsTypically 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience with JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, Express)Strong experience shipping and operating high-traffic consumer applicationsProven ability to own production systems end-to-end, including debugging and prioritizationDeep MongoDB experience: indexing strategies, the aggregation framework, and query-level performance tuning (native driver experience preferred over ORM-only backgrounds)Comfortable working across backend and frontend (React/Next.js)Experience with Redis for caching, session management, or real-time dataExperience with CI/CD workflows and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes)Strong written and spoken English; able to communicate clearly in async environmentsWillingness to challenge assumptions, document trade-offs, and disagree constructivelyUseful Experience (Not Required)Depth in one or two of these areas is more valuable than surface familiarity with all of them.Production & ReliabilityMessage queues (NATS, SQS, or equivalent)Search infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch)Incident ownership: on-call experience, postmortems, and improving systems after failuresCloudflare or similar edge and traffic management toolsGrafana or other observability platformsPerformance & FrontendLoad testing with tools like K6, JMeter, or similarSSR and rendering strategiesFrontend performance optimization and profilingAI & Advanced WorkflowsIntegrating AI APIs (LLMs, image, voice, multimodal)GPU or serverless workflowsPython for supporting services or toolingCompensation & LogisticsBase: ₹25 LPA (negotiable for exceptional candidates)Variable: up to ₹15 LPA based on impact and outcomes (reviewed quarterly)Payment: every two weeks via bank depositTime off: 18 days of paid leave per year plus 10 public holidays. Sick leave and emergencies accommodated responsibly. Weekends off by default.Team: you'll join a 4-person engineering team reporting to the Lead Developer, working alongside infrastructure contractors and generative AI engineers.The company is profitable and operating with a long-term view on stability and growth.