Job Title

Senior Full-Stack EngineerBackend-Heavy · Remote (India) · Full-Time ContractAt a Glance Location: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 deposit Experience Level:Senior Full-Stack Engineering, backend-heavy (typically 7+ years; exceptional candidates considered with strong evidence of production ownership)About the Role We'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 Own A 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 Like In your first 3–6 months, success is demonstrated by outcomes such as: Measurable improvements in reliability, latency, or error rates across the systems you own Faster detection of regressions or user-impacting issues through better instrumentation and alerting At least one meaningful contribution to the monolith-to-services migration — a cleanly extracted boundary, a safer rollout pattern Reduced operational risk through clearer contracts, simpler system boundaries, or improved deployment confidence Establishing reusable patterns (not just one-off fixes) that make the system easier to debug, operate, and evolve Success 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 Work Individual Contributor (IC) role:no people management; your impact comes from what you own and ship Async-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 partners Bias for clarity:small diffs, fast deploys, while maintaining a strong systems design vision High trust environment:ownership comes with real decision-making authority, including the responsibility to flag riskRequirements Typically 7+ years of professional backend engineering experience with JavaScript/TypeScript (Node.js, Express) Strong experience shipping and operating high-traffic consumer applications Proven ability to own production systems end-to-end, including debugging and prioritization Deep 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 data Experience with CI/CD workflows and container orchestration (Docker, Kubernetes) Strong written and spoken English; able to communicate clearly in async environments Willingness 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 & Reliability Message queues (NATS, SQS, or equivalent) Search infrastructure (Elasticsearch, OpenSearch) Incident ownership: on-call experience, postmortems, and improving systems after failures Cloudflare or similar edge and traffic management tools Grafana or other observability platformsPerformance & Frontend Load testing with tools like K6, JMeter, or similar SSR and rendering strategies Frontend performance optimization and profilingAI & Advanced Workflows Integrating AI APIs (LLMs, image, voice, multimodal) GPU or serverless workflows Python for supporting services or toolingCompensation & Logistics Base:₹25 LPA (negotiable for exceptional candidates) Variable:up to ₹15 LPA based on impact and outcomes (reviewed quarterly) Payment:every two weeks via bank deposit Time 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.