Backend Developer (bilingual: Mandarin-English)

We’re building a mobile-first information platform and are approaching production launch. We’re looking for a Senior Backend Software Engineer to co-own our backend architecture and ensure the system is scalable, reliable, and production-ready.

This role is ideal for someone who enjoys designing systems and running them in the real world — handling performance bottlenecks, debugging production issues, and improving reliability as usage grows.

You’ll work closely with a small team and have meaningful influence over architecture, infrastructure decisions, and engineering practices.


What You’ll Do

System Design & Scalability

Review and improve backend system architecture for scale and reliability
Identify and resolve performance bottlenecks across services, databases, and caches
Design data models and APIs that scale as traffic and usage grow
Improve caching strategies and consistency patterns

Database & Performance

Optimize MySQL schemas, queries, and indexing strategies
Analyze slow queries and improve transaction performance
Plan for read scaling (replicas, partitioning strategies, etc.)

Production Reliability & Operations

Improve observability: logging, metrics, tracing, dashboards, and alerts
Debug and resolve production issues, including intermittent and edge-case failures
Design systems with resilience in mind (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers)
Participate in on-call and incident response as needed

Release Safety & Engineering Discipline

Improve deployment safety (blue-green, canary, rollback strategies)
Design safe database migration and backward-compatible changes
Contribute to engineering best practices and post-incident improvements

Our Tech Stack

Backend: Java, Spring Boot
Infrastructure: AWS ECS (Fargate), ALB, CloudWatch
Database: MySQL (RDS)
Caching: AWS ElastiCache (Redis)
Client: React Native (mobile)
CI/CD: GitHub Actions

Experience with similar stacks is welcome; deep backend and system design fundamentals matter most.

What We’re Looking For

Required

5+ years of backend engineering experience
Strong system design and distributed systems fundamentals
Experience building and operating production backend services
Solid understanding of relational databases and query optimization
Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS preferred)
Ability to debug complex issues under real-world constraints
Fluent spoken Mandarin required; ability to participate in technical discussions and collaborate with Mandarin-speaking stakeholders.

Strong Plus

Experience with Spring Boot in high-traffic systems
Hands-on experience with MySQL performance tuning
Experience with caching systems
Familiarity with observability tools (metrics, tracing, logging)
Startup or small-team experience with high ownership

What Success Looks Like

Backend services remain stable and performant as usage grows
Production issues are detected early and resolved quickly
Architecture evolves thoughtfully without unnecessary complexity
The team ships with confidence, even under pressure

Why Join Us

High ownership and real impact on system design and product success
Work on meaningful, production-critical problems
Small team, minimal bureaucracy, fast decision-making
Opportunity to shape the technical foundation of a growing product