Back-End Developer

Backend Developer — Norlease North Bay, ON (Remote-friendly) Norlease is building the first verified rental listing platform for North Bay and Northern Ontario. The core problem we're solving is trust: rental listing sites today let anyone post anything, which means renters waste time on fake landlords, scam listings, and properties that don't exist. Norlease fixes this at the infrastructure level. Every landlord goes through phone verification and manual ID review before a single listing goes live. No income filtering, no credit checks, free for everyone, for now. The platform is live in production today, built on real infrastructure handling real verification flows, real geospatial queries, and real transactional messaging, not a weekend prototype. We're pushing toward a September launch across Northern Ontario, and we need someone who can own the systems underneath the product, not just write endpoints that pass tests. What you'd actually be working on The core backend is built and running: listing state machines, geospatial search, photo processing pipelines, phone and ID verification, and transactional email are all live. What we need now is someone to help harden, scale, and extend that foundation as usage grows: Optimizing geospatial queries as listing volume grows across an expanding service area, our search runs on PostGIS with viewport-driven querying, and it needs to stay fast as the map fills inInvestigating and resolving database compute and connection efficiency issues, including background job scheduling behavior that's been eating more compute than expectedExtending the verification pipeline (phone OTP plus manual ID/selfie review) as volume increases, including admin tooling that keeps review turnaround fast without cutting corners on trustBuilding out the next layer of platform features: notifications, listing lifecycle automation (expiry, renewal reminders), and the beginnings of a monetization layer (featured listings, lead tracking)Working directly with photo storage and processing pipelines, including format conversion and duplicate-image detection at upload timeOwning reliability: catching silent failures before they cost us weeks (we've learned this lesson the hard way once already), and building the logging and monitoring to make sure it doesn't happen againThis isn't a "maintain what exists" role. It's a "help a real system scale from one city to a whole region" role, with real ownership over architecture decisions along the way. Our stack Next.js 15 (App Router) API routes, TypeScriptDrizzle ORM, Neon Postgres with PostGIS and pg_trgm for geospatial and fuzzy searchClerk for auth, including role-based access and admin gatingCloudflare R2 for object storage, with an image processing pipeline (format conversion, perceptual hashing for duplicate detection)Telnyx for SMS/phone verification, Resend for transactional emailSelf-hosted OSRM for routing and travel-time calculationsBackground job processing (pg-boss)Hetzner + Coolify for deployment, Cloudflare for DNS/edge, Docker-based infra with UFW firewall rulesWhat we're looking for 2-3 years of professional backend experience, ideally with Node.js/TypeScript and a relational database in productionStrong SQL fundamentals, and comfort working with Postgres directly, not just through an ORM abstraction. Experience with PostGIS or other geospatial data is a real plusExperience designing and reasoning about state machines or multi-step workflows (listing lifecycles, verification queues, approval flows)Comfortable working with third-party APIs and webhooks (SMS, email, storage, auth providers) and handling their failure modes gracefullyA debugging mindset: comfortable tracing a production issue back to its actual root cause rather than patching symptomsSomeone who takes reliability seriously, this system handles real user verification data and needs to be trustworthy by design, not by accidentBonus: experience with background job queues, image processing pipelines, or self-hosted infrastructure (Docker, VPS deployment, reverse proxies)What you won't be doing Writing CRUD endpoints in a vacuum with no context on why they matter. You'll be working on systems where a bug or a bad query has a real, visible impact on real landlords and renters, and where fixing something well is noticed and valued. Why this one's worth a look You'd be an early technical hire on a product that's already live, verified, and solving a real trust problem in a real, underserved market. Direct access to the founder, fast decisions, and the kind of ownership over core infrastructure that most backend roles at this experience level don't offer. Your work ships to production within days, not buried in a review queue for months. Interested? Send a note with something you've built recently that you're proud of, ideally something involving data modeling, APIs, or infrastructure decisions you made and why. See what we're building: northlease.ca · instagram.com/norlease