Looking for an exceptional Backend / Systems Engineer to help build a serious data intelligence platform
I’m looking for a highly capable engineer to help me build and harden a backend-heavy data platform.
This is not a simple CRUD app. The hard parts are data correctness, identity resolution, bitemporal history, idempotent pipelines, unreliable external APIs, scraping, schema drift, concurrency, and deciding when the system should say “we don’t know” instead of guessing.
The product tracks public signals from sources like job postings, career pages, GitHub activity, LinkedIn data, research, publications, and professional movement, then turns those signals into accurate intelligence.
What you’ll work on:
- Backend pipelines for scraping, enrichment, matching, and signal generation
- Identity resolution across people, companies, emails, GitHub, LinkedIn, and job history
- Idempotent, retry-safe background jobs
- PostgreSQL data modeling, migrations, constraints, and transaction safety
- Bitemporal/versioned data where historical truth matters
- External API integrations with messy, drifting, unreliable data
- Production debugging, observability, runbooks, and correctness hardening
- Tests against real PostgreSQL, not just mocks
Tech stack:
- TypeScript / Node.js
- PostgreSQL
- Prisma
- Express
- pg-boss
- Zod
- Vitest / Testcontainers
Who I’m looking for:
I need someone exceptional. Someone who can take an ambiguous, hard problem and think through the architecture, invariants, edge cases, and failure modes.
You should be the kind of engineer who:
- Thinks in systems, not just tickets
- Cares deeply about correctness and data quality
- Can debug complex async/database/API issues
- Writes simple, maintainable code
- Can work independently without needing every detail specified
- Challenges assumptions and proposes better solutions
- Understands that “mostly works” is not good enough when bad data creates bad decisions
Strong pluses:
- Experience with scraping or data enrichment
- Identity resolution, entity matching, deduplication, or data provenance
- Bitemporal/versioned data models
- PostgreSQL-heavy backend systems
- Recruiting, market intelligence, OSINT, or graph-style intelligence products
- Interest in technical hiring, quant/HFT talent markets, GitHub signal mining, or low-level systems talent
Not a fit if:
You only want clearly scoped tickets, avoid ambiguous problems, or treat tests and data integrity as secondary concerns. This project needs someone who can think deeply, find the real failure modes, and help build systems that stay correct when inputs, APIs, and timing are hostile.
Open to contract, part-time, or full-time depending on fit. I’d rather work with one exceptional person than several average ones.
Open on the budget, but for the rules: ($30 - $100 HOURLY)