Senior Backend Engineer (Founding) — Venniva

About Venniva: Venniva is a people-first social network built around who you are, not just who you know. It uses your interests, taste, communities, intentions, and social context to help you express yourself and discover people worth connecting with — through social feeds, communities, messaging, and live and in-person experiences. We're building the backend now and looking for a founding engineer to own it.
The Role We're looking for an experienced backend developer to technically own the server-side application — architecture, APIs, data model, infrastructure, reliability, and security — and its integration with the native iOS client (built separately in Swift/SwiftUI). A Computer Science degree from a reputable university (e.g., FAST, NUST, COMSATS) is highly preferred, but strong technical ownership and backend expertise are what matter most.
We're building with OpenAI Codex extensively to move fast, so this role is specifically for someone comfortable in an AI-assisted engineering environment: reviewing and improving Codex-generated TypeScript/backend code rather than accepting it as-is, and making sure everything that reaches production is genuinely production-quality engineering, not just functional code.
Backend Stack TypeScript · Node.js · NestJS · Fastify · PostgreSQL · Supabase (database, auth, storage)
What You'll Own
Architecture & Code Quality
Establish and maintain a clean, scalable NestJS architecture — modules, services, repositories, domain boundaries, dependency structure
Ensure Codex-generated features follow existing architecture, conventions, and domain boundaries
Code review, refactoring, and preventing unnecessary technical debt
Document key architectural, database, and security decisions
Help determine when existing infrastructure is sufficient versus when specific workloads should move to more specialized services as the product scales
API & Data Layer
Design and maintain clean, versioned APIs for the iOS client, with consistent request validation, serialization, and error handling
Use Fastify effectively for performance and request handling
Design the PostgreSQL data model — relationships, constraints, migrations, indexing strategy
Query optimization and identifying database performance bottlenecks
Design and review Supabase Row Level Security policies
Core Product Systems
Social graph functionality: follows, relationships, communities, memberships, blocks, privacy, permissions
Feed and pagination architecture
Messaging and realtime backend architecture
Notifications and event-driven workflows
Media upload and storage flows for photos, video, and other user-generated content
Support recommendation and discovery systems with clean event/data pipelines
Security & Access Control
Authentication, authorization, roles, permissions, and secure session/token handling
Ensure users can access only the data and actions they're authorized for
Secure handling of secrets, credentials, and service-to-service authentication
Rate limiting, abuse prevention, and protection of sensitive endpoints
Input validation and protection against common application vulnerabilities
Dependency and supply-chain security
Design moderation, reporting, blocking, privacy, and safety foundations
Reliability & Performance
Background jobs, queues, scheduled processing, retries, and idempotency
Caching strategies to reduce unnecessary database and API load
Concurrency, transaction handling, race-condition prevention, and data consistency
Design reliable workflows for operations spanning multiple services or database changes
Performance profiling, benchmarking, and optimization
Testing, Observability & Release
Unit, integration, API, and end-to-end tests, with critical business logic and security-sensitive flows thoroughly covered
Database testing and migration safety
Logging, monitoring, metrics, tracing, and error reporting — systems designed so production issues can be diagnosed quickly
CI/CD, automated quality checks, safe database migrations, and deployment practices
Environment and configuration management
Review backend and database changes before they reach production
Integrations
Integrate third-party services where appropriate — live audio/video infrastructure, analytics, notifications, or payments
What We're Looking For
Strong engineering judgment, not just Node.js/NestJS syntax knowledge — someone who can act as technical owner, not just an implementer
Experience with social platforms, consumer applications, realtime systems, media-heavy products, messaging systems, or large PostgreSQL-backed applications is a plus
Comfort working aggressively with AI-assisted tools (Codex) while holding the line on production quality
Someone who wants to make sound architectural and data-modeling decisions from the ground up, not just execute a spec
Engagement & Compensation
~6 months, ~25 - 35 hrs/week
Equity in the company for the engagement period
Contingent on Venniva closing funding: full salary for the engagement period paid retroactively, plus an offer letter to continue as a paid founding team member

Work arrangement
No