Senior Backend Engineer (Node.js / TypeScript)

Company: warpSpeed (UK)
Location: Fully remote, India (with a daily overlap with UK working hours)
Job type: Full-time
Experience: 6+ years in backend development, 3+ years with Node.js and TypeScript in production
Salary: Highly competitive
About warpSpeed:
warpSpeed is building the world’s most personalised AI assistant. Our mobile app brings a person’s email, calendar, notes, tasks and messaging together across all their accounts, Gmail, Outlook and more, and puts an AI assistant on top that understands how they work and helps them stay on top of everything.
We’re not building another inbox or another to-do list. We’re building one place where the AI can see the whole picture and act on it: triaging email, scheduling, drafting, following up and turning conversations into work that gets done.
Who you’ll be working for:
warpSpeed is a UK-based company founded by Martin Warner, a serial entrepreneur with a track record of building and scaling technology ventures. It’s a founder-led team where engineering is a first-class priority: your work is visible, valued and central to every release.
The role:
This is a full-time remote role for candidates based in India. You'll work directly with our UK-based leadership, product, and marketing teams on a product used by a global audience. Compensation is competitive within the Indian market and will be determined by your experience and expertise.
We’re looking for a senior backend engineer to own the warpSpeed platform backend and lead a small team of two to three backend developers. You’ll report to the CTO, but day to day you’ll run the backend side of engineering yourself: turning product requirements into APIs and services, making architecture and data-model decisions, reviewing code and keeping production healthy.
The backend is the heart of the product. It connects to users’ Google and Microsoft accounts, keeps their email, calendars and contacts in sync, serves the mobile and web apps over REST and WebSockets, runs background jobs and scheduled automations, handles subscriptions and billing, and feeds data to our AI service. It’s a real system with real users, not a greenfield prototype, so we need someone who can improve it steadily while it keeps running.
This is a hands-on lead role. You’ll still spend most of your time designing and writing code, but you’ll also be the person the team goes to with questions, and the person the CTO relies on to know the state of the platform and keep delivery on track without close supervision.
What you’ll do:
Lead the backend team
Take product requirements and turn them into a technical design, API contracts and well-scoped work for the team.
Set and uphold coding standards, review pull requests and give feedback that improves the team.
Mentor and unblock the other backend developers and help them grow.
Own delivery: estimate honestly, flag risks early and keep the CTO informed without needing to be chased.
Own the platform
Design and build REST APIs and real-time (WebSocket) features for the mobile and web apps.
Build and maintain integrations with third-party providers: Gmail, Microsoft Graph / Outlook, IMAP, CalDAV and others, including OAuth flows, rate limits, webhooks and the edge cases that come with them.
Own the sync engine that keeps users’ email, calendar and contacts up to date, making it more reliable, efficient and observable.
Design database schemas and migrations, and keep queries fast as data grows.
Build event-driven and scheduled background work using queues and distributed cron jobs.
Own production health: monitoring, alerting, incident response, root-cause analysis and follow-up fixes.
Keep security and privacy at the centre: we hold access to people’s inboxes, and we treat that with the care it deserves.
Work across the product
Work closely with the AI engineers on the contract between the backend and our Python AI service: what data the assistant can see, which actions it can take and how token usage is accounted for.
Work with the mobile team on API design, pagination, real-time events and error handling that makes sense on a phone.
Work with the CTO on infrastructure and deployment on AWS.
Write and maintain the technical documentation the team relies on.
What you’ll bring
6+ years of professional backend development, including 3+ years building production services in Node.js and TypeScript.
Experience leading or mentoring other developers, whether as a tech lead, a team lead or the senior engineer others rely on.
Strong API design skills (REST, and ideally WebSockets / Socket.IO), with a clear sense of what makes an API good to use from a mobile client.
Strong relational database skills: schema design, migrations, indexing and query tuning, ideally MySQL or PostgreSQL with an ORM such as Prisma.
Experience with asynchronous and distributed systems: message queues, background workers, retries, idempotency and job locking.
Experience integrating with third-party APIs at scale, including OAuth 2.0. Direct experience with the Gmail API or Microsoft Graph is a big plus.
Hands-on experience running services on AWS (or another major cloud) in containers, with CI/CD pipelines.
Good instincts for security: authentication, authorisation, secrets management and handling sensitive personal data.
Experience with automated testing (unit and integration) and a habit of leaving code better tested than you found it.
The ability to work independently in a fully remote team: you take ownership, communicate clearly in writing and don’t wait to be told what to do next.
A degree in Computer Science or Software Engineering, or equivalent experience.
Our backend stack
You don’t need to have used every one of these, but it helps to know what you’ll be working with:
Node.js and TypeScript in a pnpm monorepo of shared packages and independently deployable services
Koa for the REST API, with Zod for validation and Swagger for API docs
MySQL with Prisma
Redis / Valkey, AWS SQS and a standalone scheduler service for background and scheduled work
Socket.IO for real-time updates to clients
Gmail API, Microsoft Graph, IMAP and CalDAV integrations
Stripe, App Store and Google Play billing
AWS: ECS Fargate, RDS, ElastiCache, S3, OpenSearch and CDK for infrastructure as code
A change-data-capture pipeline (Debezium) that feeds our vector search indexes
GitHub Actions, Jest, Bugsnag and Amplitude
A Python / FastAPI / LangGraph AI service that the backend calls for the AI assistant
Nice to have
Experience building email, calendar or messaging products, or deep knowledge of email standards (MIME, threading, IMAP).
Experience with subscription billing across Stripe and the mobile app stores.
Experience with infrastructure as code (AWS CDK, Terraform or CloudFormation).
Experience with search and vector databases (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch) or change-data-capture pipelines.
Experience integrating LLMs into backend systems, or enough Python to work comfortably with our AI service.
Daily use of AI coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot or similar), and good judgement about when to trust them.
What we offer
A highly competitive salary.
Fully remote work.
Real ownership: you’ll lead the platform backend, not just a ticket queue.
An engineering-led, collaborative environment with a founder who values technical excellence.
A product in daily use by a growing global user base, at the cutting edge of applied AI.

Work arrangement
Yes