Backend Developer -Lead

Company: BigThinkCode Technologies

URL: https://www.bigthinkcode.com/

Experience required: 3-4 years

Work location: Chennai

Joining time: Immediate – 2 weeks

Work Mode: Work from office / Hybrid

About the Role

We're looking for a skilled Node.js Developer with 3+ years of experience building scalable applications using event-driven architecture within distributed systems. The ideal candidate is comfortable working on high-performance backend services and has a strong understanding of asynchronous programming patterns. Exposure to knowledge embedding and vectorization techniques is a strong plus, especially for modern data-driven or AI-powered systems.

Key Responsibilities

• Design, develop, and maintain server-side applications using Node.js
• Build and optimize scalable, event-driven systems in distributed environments
• Implement asynchronous workflows, message queues, and pub/sub architectures
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to define and deliver backend solutions

Required Skills

• 3+ years of hands-on experience with Node.js
• Strong understanding of event-driven architecture and non-blocking I/O
• Experience working with distributed systems and microservices architecture
• Proficiency in RESTful API design and implementation
• Experience with databases such as MongoDB, PostgreSQL, or MySQL
• Experience with containerization tools like Docker and orchestration tools like Kubernetes

Good to Have

• Experience with knowledge embedding and vectorization techniques
• Familiarity with vector databases (e.g., Pinecone, Weaviate, FAISS)
• Understanding of cloud platforms (AWS, Azure, or GCP)

Why Join Us:

• Collaborative work environment.
• Exposure to modern tools and scalable application architectures.
• Medical cover for employee and eligible dependents.
• Tax beneficial salary structure.
• Comprehensive leave policy
• Competency development training programs.

About the Role

Unico Connect is an AI-first technology partner that builds custom mobile, web, and AI products for clients across multiple geographies. We are hiring a Backend Engineer for a dedicated client engagement building an AI-powered application builder platform.

The backend is the operational core of the product: it manages user projects and sessions, coordinates long-running AI agent workloads, maintains project state, and serves as the integration layer between the frontend, the AI system, and the underlying infrastructure.

The mandatory requirement is hands-on production experience shipping Node.js services, with end-to-end ownership of API design, data modelling, and at least one production system involving background job processing or event-driven patterns.

Responsibilities

API and service development: Design and build REST APIs in Node.js with TypeScript. Cover authentication, session management, input validation, structured error handling, streaming responses (SSE, WebSockets), and rate limiting. Maintain clean API contracts that the frontend and AI system can rely on.

Database design and management: Own PostgreSQL schema design for product domains including user accounts, projects, file trees, session state, and generated artefacts. Write efficient queries, manage migrations, and optimise for read patterns that serve a real-time editor experience.

Caching strategy: Implement and maintain caching with Redis for session data, project state, and frequently read configuration. Design cache invalidation logic that keeps the editor experience consistent without stale reads.

Queue and background job management: Implement and operate background job infrastructure using BullMQ or equivalent. AI agent runs are long-running and stateful; handle retries, failure states, priority queues, and concurrency limits.

AI system integration: Build the integration layer between the backend and the AI agent system. Manage job dispatch, result handling, streaming output to the frontend, and error propagation.

Multi-tenancy and access control: Implement tenant data isolation, RBAC, and resource ownership enforcement across all API surfaces.

Observability and reliability: Instrument services with structured logging, metrics, and tracing. Write defensive code with sensible timeouts, fallback behaviour, and circuit breaking on external dependencies.

Testing and code quality: Write unit and integration tests for the services you ship. Review the work of peers and contribute to shared engineering conventions.

Requirements

• Hands-on production Node.js experience (mandatory) — must have personally shipped at least one feature area end to end in a production Node.js service, owning API design, data modelling, and testing.

• 3 to 5 years of professional backend engineering experience. Candidates with slightly less time but strong demonstrated ownership are welcome to apply.

• Strong Node.js and TypeScript. Production experience with Express, NestJS, or Fastify. Solid with async patterns, streaming, error handling, and building services that run reliably under sustained load.

• PostgreSQL depth. Schema design, query writing, indexing, and migrations on at least one production system.

• Redis and caching. Production experience using Redis for caching and session management. Understands cache invalidation trade-offs.

• Queue and background job systems. Hands-on with BullMQ, RabbitMQ, SQS, or equivalent. Experience managing retries, dead-letter queues, job priority, and concurrency control.

• AWS working knowledge. Comfortable with EC2, S3, RDS, SQS, and IAM. Familiar with Docker and basic deployment and environment management.

• Strong written and spoken English. Able to communicate clearly with engineers across disciplines and write precise technical documentation.

Nice to Have

Experience integrating with AI or LLM services (streaming responses, structured outputs, retry patterns); WebSocket or SSE implementation for real-time features; multi-tenant SaaS product experience; GraphQL; OpenTelemetry instrumentation; prior work on developer tools or editor-style products.

What You’ll Do:

• Work closely with the core team to understand their needs and ensure that our products are meeting the needs of the market.
• Designing database structure that are easy to maintain, improves data consistency and are cost effective in terms of disk storage space
• Identify, prioritise and execute tasks in the software development life cycle
• Develop tools and applications by producing clean, efficient code
• Document and demonstrate solutions by developing documentation, flowcharts, layouts, diagrams, charts, code comments and clear code
• Build efficient, testable, and reusable PHP modules

What You’ll Bring

• Bachelor's in Computer Science, Software Engineering or a related field.
• A 5+ years of experience in developing desktop and mobile web applications
• Strong knowledge of core PHP with experience of working with MVC framework such as CodeIgniter & Laravel
• Experience with object-oriented PHP programming
• Experience with third party API integration
• Experience in managing AWS services
• Previous experience creating scalable applications
• Knowledge of multiple front-end languages and libraries (e.g. HTML/ CSS, JavaScript, XML, jQuery)

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to join our Technology team. You will be responsible for the server-side of our web applications. You’ll be working closely with our engineers to ensure system consistency and improve user experience.

You’ll be part of a cross-functional team that’s responsible for the full software development life cycle, from conception to deployment.

Skills and Expertise

• Strong experience with backend technologies (PHP / Laravel framework)
• Deep understanding of REST API design and WebSockets
• Confident handling of Git, IntelliJ/Eclipse, Docker and/or Kubernetes, Maven, Jenkins or comparable tools
• You have knowledge in the development of a micro service architecture with modern technologies
• Apply software best practices such as CI/CD, TDD and clean code principles
• Eager to learn new technologies and concepts and aspiration to constantly improve yourself
• Experience in working with APIs, both third-party and custom written
• Good understanding of applications building and debugging with reusability and modularity in mind
• A structured, creative, and solution-oriented way of working

Responsibilities

• Work with development teams and product managers to ideate solutions
• Design client-side and server-side architecture
• Build the front-end of applications through appealing visual design
• Develop and manage well-functioning databases and applications
• Write effective APIs
• Test software to ensure responsiveness and efficiency
• Troubleshoot, debug and upgrade software
• Create security and data protection settings
• Build features and applications with a mobile responsive design
• Write technical documentation
• Work with data scientists and analysts to improve the product

Task:

• Develop, record, and maintain cutting-edge web-based PHP applications.
• Build innovative, state-of-the-art applications and collaborate with the User Experience (UX) team
• Ensure HTML, CSS, and shared JavaScript is valid and consistent across applications.
• Prepare and maintain all applications utilizing standard development tools.
• Utilize backend data services and contribute to increase existing data services API.
• Lead the entire web application development life cycle right from concept stage to delivery and post launch support.
• Refactor, optimize, and improve the existing codebase for maintenance and scale.
• Use test driven development and acceptance tests to ensure feature quality
• Convey effectively with all task progress, evaluations, suggestions, schedules along with technical and process issues.
• Document the development process, architecture, and standard components.
• Coordinate with co-developers and keeps project manager well informed of the status of development effort and serves as a liaison between development staff and project manager.
• Keep abreast of new trends and best practices in web development.

We wish:

• Previous working experience as a PHP Developer for 4 year(s)
• User authentication and authorization between multiple systems, servers, and environments
• Integration of multiple data sources and databases into one system
• Familiarity with limitations of PHP as a platform and its workarounds
• Proficient in PHP, HTML5, JavaScript, JQuery Expert
• Experience with PHP MVC frameworks (Symfony, Laravel, Yii, CodeIgniter, Zend, etc.)
• Excellent relational database skills with MySQL
• Experience with building restful JSON web services
• Knowledge of API’s, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google maps, Instagram, etc.
• Understanding of responsive design frameworks such as bootstrap

Desirable:

• Should have problem-solving skills
• Good experience in oops concept
• Good experience  in MVC
• Good experience in jQuery & JavaScript
• Learn & work on new technologies/ frameworks.
• Knowledge of bootstrap

We Offer:

• Freedom to realize your ideas & individual career & development opportunities.
• A motivating work environment, flat hierarchical structure, numerous company events that cannot be forgotten, and fun at the workplace with flexibilities.
• Professional challenges and career development opportunities.

• Designing and Developing web applications using Laravel 7 / 8
• Closely working front-end and back-end developers on projects.
• Hands on experience with handing MySQL queries
• Excellent logical and analytics skill
• Experience on handling and developing API end points
• Experience with Payment Gateway integrations and implementations
• Knowledge on any Frontend Framework - Bootstrap / Foundation / Backbone (Secondary skills, added advantage)

• Follow standard coding structure with Security first approach to avoid vulnerabilities such as SQL Injection and XSS
• Sound knowledge on integrating multiple payment gateway