Backend Engineer

At TiJUBU we are building the living company OS: workforce intelligence that spans humans and AI agents. We help organisations see, rewire, and grow their workforce in real time, across skills, roles, mobility, pay, and purpose. We are early, defining a new category, and serious about building it well. We handle sensitive employee data across the EU, so reliability and privacy are core to the product, not an afterthought. The role You are the person who makes sure what we ship is solid, and you own the hard parts underneath it. Our product team builds solutions end to end, and you take them the last, critical mile: you hold the technical standard, harden the work, and put it into production at a bar we can stand behind. You also own the parts that cannot be shortcut: the data models, the reliability of our systems under load and failure, the integrations with the world's HR systems, and the privacy and compliance our customers depend on. You are at your best in a close-knit team. You design, pair, and review, and you bring the same rigour to other people's work as to your own. What you'll do Design and evolve the architecture and data models as the platform grows, keeping data correct and consistent.Own the event-driven worker layer and keep the system reliable under load and partial failure, with idempotency, retries, backpressure, and replay.Evolve live schemas and data with zero downtime and no lost records, and move the system through change without regressions.Take the product team's solutions the last mile: validate, harden, integrate, and ship to production against the agreed standard.Build and own privacy-first, read-only integrations with the major HR systems.Keep us GDPR, SOC 2, and ISO 27001 sound, with EU data residency and a solid authorization model.Build and operate LLM-powered features in production (retrieval, agents, and the evaluation and guardrails that keep them reliable), and use AI in how you build every day. What you'll bring A strong track record building and operating backend systems in production.Deep TypeScript and Node.js, strong SQL, and hands-on PostgreSQL.You have designed and run non-trivial migrations on live systems: schema, data, or platform.Fluency with event-driven and message-queue architectures and their reliability patterns (idempotency, retries, DLQs, ordering).You design for failure modes up front.You write things down and decide in the open.Comfort working to a standard agreed with product, and the judgement to enforce it, including on AI-built code.Based in Portugal, with professional working English. Nice to have Authorization-model work (RBAC, ABAC).Consolidating or migrating between ORMs (Prisma, TypeORM).Production experience with a job or queue system (BullMQ, RabbitMQ, Kafka, SQS).LLM integration in a production backend.Experience in a compliance-sensitive environment (GDPR, SOC 2, ISO 27001). How we work Remote-friendly and Lisbon-based, in a close-knit team with direct founder access and real autonomy on hard problems. We design, pair, and review in the open, and AI is central to how we build. Birthday off. Compensation Salary, aligned with experience. Warm, precise, human. If this is you, let's talk.