Contract Software Engineer (Typescript, Node.js) - Portugal

We are looking for a senior Backend Engineer to join our team and help design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable, and well-architected backend systems that power real customer investment and financial services.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role for someone who combines strong technical depth with ownership, pragmatism, and a production-first mindset. You will be responsible not only for building services, but also for operating them in production, ensuring reliability, observability, and continuous improvement across the full lifecycle of distributed systems.

You should be comfortable working primarily with Node.js and TypeScript, while also being confident operating within AWS-based cloud environments, particularly serverless architectures. We value engineers who can make sound architectural decisions in event-driven, distributed systems, and who are comfortable working across infrastructure, application code, and operational concerns.

Our engineering culture emphasizes autonomy with accountability: engineers are expected to own their services end-to-end, from design through deployment and production support, while collaborating closely with product, operations, and other engineering teams.

Contract type: Independent contractor / B2B

Duration: 12 months initial contract

Location: Portugal, remote

Commitment: Full-time, Monday–Friday

Invoicing: Monthly invoice, payment terms to be confirmed

Extension: Possible extension depending on project needs

We are looking for someone who has:

• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Experience with AWS cloud services, especially serverless architectures (e.g. AWS Lambda) and event-driven systems.
• Strong experience building and operating scalable backend APIs and services.
• Experience with CI/CD pipelines and automated deployment workflows (e.g. GitHub Actions).
• Strong engineering fundamentals, including system design, testing, refactoring, observability, and production readiness.
• Experience designing and working with distributed systems, including asynchronous workflows and event-driven architectures.
• Understanding of system reliability concepts such as retries, idempotency, failure handling, and consistency trade-offs.
• Experience working in environments where you are expected to take ownership, identify problems, and drive solutions independently.
• Strong communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with engineers, product managers, and operational stakeholders.

Nice-to-have experience

• Experience with MongoDB in scalable or distributed systems.
• Experience with infrastructure as code (Terraform, Serverless Framework).
• Experience evolving architectures from serverless-first designs toward container-based solutions (e.g. ECS/Fargate).
• Familiarity with incident management tooling and practices (e.g. incident response platforms such as incident.io).
• Experience with statically typed languages beyond TypeScript (e.g. C# or similar).

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain high-quality backend services using Node.js and TypeScript.
• Design and operate AWS-based serverless systems with a strong focus on scalability, reliability, and cost efficiency.
• Develop and maintain event-driven architectures and asynchronous workflows.
• Design robust APIs with attention to performance, correctness, and maintainability.
• Own services in production, including monitoring, alerting, debugging, and incident response.
• Implement and maintain CI/CD pipelines to ensure safe and efficient deployments.
• Collaborate with cross-functional teams to understand business requirements and translate them into technical solutions.
• Improve system observability through effective logging, metrics, and distributed tracing.
• Participate in architectural discussions and contribute to long-term system evolution.
• Continuously improve engineering practices around testing, reliability, and operational excellence.