Software Development Engineer II - Node.JS

Role overview

The client is building a multimodal AI platform that processes multi-hour video, audio and text to generate structured insights, narratives and highlight workflows for broadcasters and media organisations.

We are seeking a Backend / Platform Engineer to design and build high-throughput media pipelines, robust APIs, and model-serving infrastructure that connect our AI engine (video perception + multimodal reasoning) to real products and customer environments.

This is not a CRUD‑only backend role.

You will work on:

• long‑running jobs
• distributed processing
• GPU inference orchestration
• storage for embeddings and metadata
• integration with AI models
• reliability and observability at scale

Key responsibilities

Media ingestion & processing pipelines

• Design and implement ingestion pipelines for multi‑hour video and audio content.
• Build microservices for frame extraction, audio processing, transcription integration and metadata generation.
• Handle long‑running, asynchronous jobs using queues, workers and robust retry strategies.
• Integrate with FFmpeg or similar tools for transcoding, segmenting and preparing media for AI models.

API & platform architecture

• Design and implement REST/gRPC APIs that expose AI model outputs (perception, multimodal alignment, narratives) to frontend and external systems.
• Define clear contracts for internal services and external integrations.
• Implement authentication, authorisation and rate‑limiting for platform endpoints.
• Ensure backward‑compatible API evolution as the product matures.

Model‑serving & AI integration

• Integrate with AI inference services (video models, multimodal models, LLM/VLM) running on GPUs or specialised infrastructure.
• Design request/response flows that handle large payloads, streaming outputs and structured results.
• Optimise throughput and latency for inference pipelines, including batching, caching and concurrency control.
• Collaborate closely with AI engineers to productionise models and debug end‑to‑end behaviour.

Storage, data models & performance

• Design data models to store embeddings, timelines, metadata, scene/shot boundaries, and narrative units.
• Work with appropriate storage technologies (SQL/NoSQL, object storage, search indices) based on access patterns.
• Implement indexing and query strategies for fast retrieval of segments, highlights and multimodal insights.
• Optimise performance for large datasets and high‑volume workloads.

Reliability, observability & operations

• Implement logging, metrics and tracing across services for debugging and monitoring.
• Set up health checks, circuit breakers and graceful degradation for critical services.
• Work with CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe, repeatable deployments.
• Collaborate on Kubernetes‑based deployments (or equivalent orchestration) for scaling services.

Requirements (must‑have)

Experience:

• 4–8 years in backend or platform engineering.
• At least 3 years working on distributed systems, high‑throughput services or complex pipelines (not just simple CRUD apps).

Languages & frameworks:

• Strong proficiency in Python or Node.js (one primary, both are a plus).
• Experience with at least one modern backend framework (FastAPI, Flask, Express, NestJS, etc.).

Distributed systems & pipelines:

• Hands‑on experience with queues and workers (e.g. Celery, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS, etc.).
• Experience building asynchronous, long‑running job pipelines.
• Understanding of idempotency, retries, backoff, and failure handling.

APIs & integration:

• Strong experience designing and implementing REST APIs (gRPC is a plus).
• Experience integrating with external services and handling network‑level failures.

Cloud & infrastructure:

• Experience deploying services on AWS, GCP or Azure (EC2/Compute Engine, S3/GCS, IAM, networking basics).
• Experience with Docker; exposure to Kubernetes is a strong plus.

Data & storage:

• Experience with SQL and at least one NoSQL store.
• Ability to design schemas and data models for performance and maintainability.

Engineering quality:

• Strong debugging skills across services and environments.
• Experience with unit/integration tests for backend systems.
• Clear, structured communication in English.

Nice‑to‑have

• Experience with media/video processing (FFmpeg, transcoding, segmenting).
• Experience with AI/ML model integration (serving models, handling inference requests).
• Experience with search/retrieval systems (e.g. Elasticsearch, vector databases).
• Experience with observability stacks (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry).
• Experience working with remote teams across time zones.

What we are explicitly NOT looking for

To reduce noise and mismatches, we are not looking for:

• Pure CRUD‑only backend developers with no pipeline or distributed systems experience.
• Engineers who have only worked on small, single‑service apps without scale or complexity.
• Candidates who cannot explain trade‑offs in architecture, data modelling and reliability.
• Candidates who are uncomfortable with ownership of subsystems end‑to‑end.

Why join us

• Work on real, complex problems at the intersection of media, AI and distributed systems.
• Collaborate with senior AI engineers working on perception, multimodal fusion and narrative reasoning.
• Build the core platform that turns AI models into a usable product for broadcasters and media organisations.
• Operate with high ownership, clear expectations and direct access to the CTO.

Job Summary:

We are looking for a skilled and motivated Backend Engineer with 2 to 4 years of professional experience to join our dynamic engineering team. You will play a key role in designing, building, and maintaining the backend systems that power our products. You’ll work closely with cross-functional teams to deliver scalable, secure, and high-performance solutions that align with business and user needs.

This role is ideal for engineers ready to take ownership of systems, contribute to architectural decisions, and solve complex backend challenges.

Website: https://www.thealteroffice.com/about

Key Responsibilities:

• Design, build, and maintain robust backend systems and APIs that are scalable and maintainable.
• Collaborate with product, frontend, and DevOps teams to deliver seamless, end-to-end solutions.
• Model and manage data using SQL (e.g., MySQL, PostgreSQL) and NoSQL databases (e.g., MongoDB, Redis), incorporating caching where needed.
• Implement and manage authentication, authorization, and data security practices.
• Write clean, well-documented, and well-tested code following best practices.
• Work with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, or Azure) to deploy, monitor, and scale services effectively.
• Use tools like Docker (and optionally Kubernetes) for containerization and orchestration of backend services.
• Maintain and improve CI/CD pipelines for faster and safer deployments.
• Monitor and debug production issues, using observability tools (e.g., Prometheus, Grafana, ELK) for root cause analysis.
• Participate in code reviews, contribute to improving development standards, and provide support to less experienced engineers.
• Work with event-driven or microservices-based architecture, and optionally use technologies like GraphQL, WebSockets, or message brokers such as Kafka or RabbitMQ when suitable for the solution.

Requirements:

• 2 to 4 years of professional experience as a Backend Engineer or similar role.
• Proficiency in at least one backend programming language (e.g., Python, Java, Go, Ruby, etc.).
• Strong understanding of RESTful API design, asynchronous programming, and scalable architecture patterns.
• Solid experience with both relational and NoSQL databases, including designing and optimizing data models.
• Familiarity with Docker, Git, and modern CI/CD workflows.
• Hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure and deployment processes (AWS, GCP, or Azure).
• Exposure to monitoring, logging, and performance profiling practices in production environments.
• A good understanding of security best practices in backend systems.
• Strong problem-solving, debugging, and communication skills.
• Comfortable working in a fast-paced, agile environment with evolving priorities.

⌛️ Where will you spend your time?

• Early-stage AI SaaS product with the potential to disrupt the Product Analytics space
• Relentlessly improving performance, scalability, and maintainability on top of being responsible for entire products
• Owning the design process, implementation, and verification of framework components leveraging standard software engineering methodologies
• Translating functional and technical requirements into detailed architecture and design.

🤝 What makes you a good fit?

• 0-2 years of experience in product development, architecture, data structures, algorithms and design.
• Experience with API integrations, database design, and backend frameworks on NodeJS and/or Python
• Experienced with an agile team environment and you prefer being a self-starter.

👀 What process do we follow?

• The whole process is designed so that it can wrap within 2 weeks
• Application: We will keep it simple. You can apply directly through this link. All we ask for is a Resume and a couple of lines around the motivation for the position you are applying for. Additional Portfolio links such as Github, Medium or a Personal website are welcome but not mandatory.
• Screening: We will screen your profile and get back with a decision within 72 working hours.
• Interviews: We will have 3 rounds of technical interviews and 2 rounds of cultural fitment interviews.
• Offer Rollout: If all looks well, we will pop a bottle of champagne.

❤️ Well Being, compensation and how we behave when no one is watching?

We care about your well-being. Along with excellent health insurance, we offer flexibility to work how you want to. We push for physical well-being and in addition to internal health sessions, you get a complimentary annual gym membership.

We assign dedicated work hours exclusively to learning & development initiatives. We respect your weekends and in terms of work hours, we believe in deliverables over anything else. We regularly host team-building sessions, off-sites and encourage discussions around mental well-being and physical well-being over everything else. Most importantly, when our chips are down, we behave the way a family would.

We admire talent and believe in rewarding people for their input. We understand that compensation is an important factor. Our compensation will be respectful to your situation, and the whole process will be transparent from the very minute we speak to you.

Most of us have grown up in a meritocratic culture where actions speak louder. We grew up saying yes to a lot of things outside of our comfort zone and we want to maintain the same without any compromise. When actions speak, we love to celebrate and amplify bold moves. We don’t have answers to a lot of questions and when we falter, we will acknowledge our missteps. There are no closed doors in the way we work. At the end of the day, we are human beings and we will ensure that you can proudly call Crunchit your home.

🍰 What gives you brownie points?

You demonstrate learnability. The founders have spent their years building things mostly independently and at times relying on the collective hive mind of peers. If you are willing to learn and dare to say yes to things that lie out of your comfort zone, you’ll love the growth and transformation.

🏡 Where will you work from?

We are operating out of Central Indiranagar, Bangalore. We are firm believers in "when we sit together on a table, we move mountains". So you will be required to come to our office [WFO], which we have designed with a lot of love and affection :)

About Us:

We are BlackLight Games; we bring culturally relevant synchronous multiplayer games experience to mobile. Our games have been rocking the Play Stores since launch. We have built cutting-edge back-end technology; we take pride that our games are played by more than 1 million players daily. Our flagship game, Ludo SuperStar has been downloaded more than 100 million times. Other titles include – CallBreak, Carrom, Solitaire, Spider Solitaire and Word games.

Website link- https://blacklightsw.com/

Position: Backend Developer

Location: Noida

Educational Qualification: B.Tech/ MCA / M.Tech / M.Sc  or relevant professional experience; preferably in Computer Science.

Skills :

• Backend: NodeJS
• Databases: MySQL/ MongoDB.

Job Summary:

What You Bring To The Team

• More than 3+ years of experience developing serverless applications using public cloud like Google Cloud/ AWS
• Knowledge of Node. js and frameworks available for it.
• Strong proficiency with JavaScript
• Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds.
• Distributed system development with an understanding of latency, scalability, scheduling, asynchronous programming, and reliability
• Understanding fundamental design principles behind a scalable application
• Experience with services common to serverless architectures, like: AWS Lambda, DynamoDB, IAM, Firebase Real Time Database, Google Cloud SQL, Cloud Tasks. It’s a bonus if you have worked on Google Cloud Project and Firebase.
• Solid Experience with NoSQL and SQL databases is required with proven experience of creating database schemas that represent and support business processes.
• Integration of multiple data sources and databases into one system.
• Experience with deploying, maintaining, debugging live systems, and end-to-end testing and analysis
• Experienced in creating micro-services based architectures, reusable components
• Experience building REST APIs and other common application architectures on the above services
• Experience building data processing pipelines
• Solid understanding of code, design, and development practices
• General comfort in exploring, assessing, and learning new frameworks
• High levels of integrity and professionalism, and an ability to channel maximum amounts of energy into the role delivering premium customer service at all times
• Adhere to different Project Management methodologies (Agile etc) and leverage different CI/CD tools

Extra Gems For

• Google, AWS and/or Industry certifications.
• Familiarity with object storage such as AWS S3, Firebase Storage, in-memory caches such as Redis
• Demonstrated performance of threat modeling, risk assessment techniques, code reviews in the context of DevSecOps security
• Knowledge of Application Monitoring using tools like Google Stackdriver
• Broad familiarity with other languages like J2EE, Python as we write some code in these as well.
• Experience with Github and advanced Github features.
• Experience of working in Product industry
• Open source contributions, interesting hobby projects.

Why Us?

• High Growth Startup environment 
• Company sponsored courses and education material
• Lots of learning opportunities 
• Work with a super-talented team of professionals
• Informal work-culture, Casual Dress Code, multiple outings and trips
• Performance Based Bonus
• Competitive Salary
• Medical Insurance for you and your family 
• Subsidies Lunch and Unlimited Snacks, Tea & Coffee in the house at all times

• Architect new and optimize existing software codebases and systems used to crawl, launch, run, and monitor the Anakin family of app crawlers
• Deeply own the lifecycle of software, including rolling out to operations, managing configurations, maintaining and upgrading, and supporting end-users
• Configure and optimize the automated testing and deployment systems used to maintain over 1000+ crawlers across the company
• Analyze data and bugs that require in-depth investigations
• Interface directly with external customers including managing relationships and steering requirements

• Extremely effective, self-driven builder
• 2+ years of experience as a backend software engineer
• 2+ years of experience with Python
• 2+ years of experience with AWS services such as EC2, S3, Lambda, etc.
• Should have managed a team of software engineers
• Deep experience with network debugging across all OSI layers (Wireshark)
• Knowledge of networks or/and cybersecurity

• Broad understanding of the landscape of software engineering design patterns and principles
• Ability to work quickly and accurately in a highly stressful environment during removing bugs in run-time within minutes
• Excellent communicator, both written and verbal

• Must be available to work extended hours and weekends when needed to meet critical deadlines
• Must have an aversion to politics and BS. Should let his/her work speak for him/her.
• Must be comfortable with uncertainty. In almost all the cases, your job will be to figure it out.
• Must not be bounded to comfort zone. Often, you will need to challenge yourself to go above and beyond.

Desired candidates must have 2-7 years experience as NodeJs Developer. If the candidate is not able to relocate to Gurgaon then we can also provide permanent Work from home for this position.

Roles and responsibilities:

• Responsible for understanding functional and business requirements and translate them into effective code
• Provide support till deployment of code into production.
• Ownership for ensuring code optimization, problem diagnosis, and on-time delivery
• Implement solutions as per the pre-defined framework /guidelines and adherence to processes
• Finding an optimal solution for the problem statement
• Conduct peer code review.

What candidate should know about:

• Excellent hands-on experience with Node.Js, Express.Js, JavaScript
• Understanding the nature of asynchronous programming and its quirks and workarounds
• Excellent hands-on experience with MongoDB, Mongo aggregation, MySQL
• Ability to build REST services, Authentications, MVC applications
• Excellent Object Oriented Programming skills and ability to write modular, secure, scalable, and maintainable code
• Experience with Elastic Search, Redis.
• Knowledge about AWS components (S3, EC2, Cloudfront, Redis Clusters, etc.)
• Self-learning abilities are required
• Familiarity with upcoming new technologies is a strong plus

• Design and develop cloud native enterprise applications 
• Define and establish conventions, standards and best practices for the SDLC process and ensure that quality control is of paramount importance at each step of the development life cycle
• Develop reusable frameworks and libraries that can drastically accelerate new application development in the future
• Participate in the requirement analysis and gathering process and also perform sit-withs with business teams to ensure there is full clarity of the problem statement
• Actively engage wih infrastructure team and take ownership of DevOps processes to ensure that build and deployment processes are efficient and optimal.
• Actively engage with project stakeholders to ensure all are in sync with the progress, risks and issues
• Quickly learn and adopt cutting edge technologies to help keep the org ahead of the curve