Senior Backend Developer

You would own the middleware layer behind a national retail platform: every third-party integration, the caching strategy, and the resilience patterns that keep checkout working when someone else's API does not. This is an ownership role, not a ticket queue, and there is no layer of management between you and the person accountable for the platform. The role Kitchen Warehouse is one of Australia's largest specialty kitchenware retailers. Our Manila office is the shared services hub for the Australian business, and we are building the in-house engineering function that will own our eCommerce platform outright. This is one of the foundational hires in that plan. Our commerce platform runs on CommerceTools with a substantial TypeScript middleware layer built on the Frontastic Extension Platform: nineteen action controller domains, a services layer, and integrations across payment, fraud, search, validation and our ERP. That middleware is where the interesting problems live, and it is the layer we are bringing in-house. You will be the engineer who owns it, defines the API contracts, designs the failure behaviour, and sets the backend standards the rest of the team works to. What you will own The BFF and middleware layer. Nineteen action controller domains, the services layer and the mapper architecture. You define the contracts and publish the specifications.Every third-party integration. Payments via CyberSource, PayPal, Afterpay, Google Pay and Apple Pay. Fraud screening via Riskified. Search via Algolia. Address and email validation, transactional email, support tooling, and NetSuite as our source of truth.Caching and resilience. Redis caching strategy, TTL policy and invalidation. Circuit breakers, retry budgets and timeout management on the paths that handle money.Backend standards. You write the standards our AI code review agents enforce on every pull request, including those raised by our external development partner. What you will do Design and publish OpenAPI specifications across all nineteen controller domains, so the frontend and backend contract is explicit and testable.Build the resilience patterns that keep checkout reliable when a payment or fraud provider degrades: circuit breakers, sensible retry policy, and deliberate fail-open or fail-closed decisions.Own and optimise the Redis caching layer, including TTL policy per data type, invalidation triggers and graceful degradation.Lead our backend type safety and code quality work, and hold the line on it through code review.Build structured logging and monitoring across the API layer, extending our existing Datadog and APM footprint.Write the runbooks that make the platform operable by people other than you.Review backend pull requests from our external development partner and lift the standard of what ships. What we are looking for Must have: 5+ years backend or full-stack engineering with Node.js and TypeScript, and genuine comfort working in strict mode.Strong API design skills across REST, with some GraphQL exposure.Hands-on experience integrating payment providers. You understand tokenisation, 3D Secure, and the practical implications of where card data flows.Hands-on experience with fraud or risk screening services, including signed request flows.Real production experience with Redis and caching architecture: invalidation strategy, TTL policy and graceful degradation.Resilience patterns you have actually implemented, not just read about: circuit breakers, retry with backoff, fallbacks and timeout budgets.Experience with serverless deployment patterns such as Netlify Functions, Vercel Functions or AWS Lambda.Strong written English. We work asynchronously across Manila and Australia, and this role writes the contracts, the standards and the runbooks.Comfortable working alongside AI tools and reviewing AI-generated code. Nice to have: Headless commerce experience, with CommerceTools strongly preferred. Shopify or BigCommerce is acceptable.Frontastic or commercetools Frontend experience. Genuinely rare, and a real advantage if you have it.Experience bringing a platform in-house from an external development partner.NetSuite or ERP integration exposure.Experience introducing observability to a system that had very little.