Job Description: The role
Senior hands-on engineer to own the technical integrity of a core backend platform — holding engineering quality, making build-vs-configuration calls under architectural direction, and anchoring a small specialist team. Accountable for delivery of their scope: built right, secured, on time, and clearly communicated. A hands-on expert engagement: building, not advising or overseeing.
This is core software development and transaction-processing work — building the operational backbone of a live system. It is not an analytics, data-warehousing, or business-intelligence role.
Must-have summary — the hard bar
A candidate must clear all of these to be a fit:
? 8–12 years hands-on, currently building — recent, personally-built and delivered work they can speak to in depth.
? Event-driven architecture designed and built — event sourcing / CQRS as a design practice, not just message-bus usage.
? Domain-modeling judgment — can tell a genuinely new pattern from a variation of an existing one.
? Multi-tenant / multi-party security — has enforced tenant isolation server-side; understands event integrity and encryption at rest and in transit.
? Delivery leadership — accountability, execution discipline, clear communication (including to non-technical stakeholders), and sound escalation judgment.
? AI-assisted-development fluency and verification — directs and verifies AI-generated code and test suites, catching plausible-but-wrong output rather than rubber-stamping green.
? Test-strategy judgment — defines what a suite must prove and spots the gaps automated generation leaves.
? Strong Python; working relational-database / projection proficiency.
? Serverless-first cloud-native — object storage and serverless compute as primary building blocks; container fluency; local cloud emulation.
? Executes within locked decisions without relitigating; thrives in a direct, fast-moving small team.
Core skills — full detail
? 8–12 years hands-on, with recent work you personally built and delivered.
? Deep event-driven architecture — event sourcing, CQRS, or similar patterns designed and built, not just used.
? Strong domain-modeling judgment — telling a genuinely new pattern from a variation of an existing one.
? Strong specification skill — turning intent into instructions precise enough to build right the first time.
? Secure-by-design across the platform's layers:
? Domain / data isolation — multi-tenant / multi-party isolation enforced server-side and re-authorized per request; paths and UI are never the isolation boundary.
? Event / transport integrity — event authenticity and tamper-evidence (message signing), and encryption in transit across all edges and internal calls.
? Encryption at rest — across the relational store, the event log, and object / lakehouse storage, with customer-managed keys.
? Security verification of AI-generated code — catches injection vectors, leaked secrets, and authorization bypasses in generated output before they land.
? Test strategy and verification judgment — defines what a suite must prove, and reviews generated tests for genuine coverage rather than green-but-hollow passing (edge cases, error paths, and boundaries automated generation tends to skip).
? Owns the test bar and CI gate — defines what must pass before merge, given humans gate generated changes.
? Hands-on with automated testing frameworks — unit / integration testing, service mocking / stubbing, and test-data generation, alongside local cloud emulation.
? Ownership and delivery discipline — accountable for getting work to done, holds a quality bar under time pressure, drives outcomes rather than waiting for direction.
? Clear communicator — surfaces risk early, reports status crisply, explains technical trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders.
? Sound escalation judgment — knows what to own and decide versus what to surface upward.
? Executes within locked architectural decisions without relitigating them; works well in a direct, fast-moving small team.
? Fluent with modern AI-assisted development tooling — directs and verifies AI-generated code with rigor.
? Strong Python proficiency.
? Working proficiency with relational databases and read-model / projection design — enough to hold the data layer if needed.
? Serverless-first cloud-native build — object storage and serverless compute as primary building blocks.
? Container fluency — containerized local development and container-image packaging of compute.
? Local cloud emulation for development and testing.
? Effective working from principles and open problems, not pre-written tickets.
Advantageous
? Configuration-driven platform experience — change absorbed as config, not rebuilds.
? Cloud-native architecture, streaming / event-processing platforms, serverless.
? Federated / keyless CI credentials, secrets management, least-privilege access design.
? Container orchestration — good to know, not required.
? Domain exposure in a data-intensive, operationally complex industry.
Assessment
A deep-dive on something you personally built, secured, and delivered — including how you enforced tenant isolation and protected data in transit and at rest — plus how you'd specify a non-trivial feature, verify the result, and judge whether its test suite actually proves correctness.
EEO:
“Mindlance is an Equal Opportunity Employer and does not discriminate in employment on the basis of – Minority/Gender/Disability/Religion/LGBTQI/Age/Veterans.”