Backend & Data Engineer

## About the Role Avenrix Services is hiring a Backend & Data Engineer to contribute to an active enterprise technology project involving backend services, data processing, enterprise search, and AI-assisted workflows. The role is primarily focused on **Node.js/TypeScript, PostgreSQL, APIs, data synchronization, production troubleshooting, observability, and reliability**. You’ll work within an existing production environment and collaborate with engineers across backend, data, search, and AI-related areas. The project also involves close collaboration with data-science engineers working on areas such as retrieval, chunking, re-ranking, and AI-assisted knowledge workflows. ## Responsibilities - Develop and maintain backend services using **Node.js and TypeScript** - Build and maintain REST APIs and backend integrations - Work with **PostgreSQL and SQL** - Investigate slow queries and backend/database performance issues - Support ETL, data pipelines, and synchronization between systems - Investigate inconsistent data, failed jobs, retries, and production issues - Help improve data consistency, reliability, and failure handling - Work with AWS-based services and environments - Use logs, metrics, and distributed tracing to troubleshoot production behavior - Work with search and retrieval systems such as OpenSearch/Elasticsearch - Collaborate with engineers working on AI/search and data-science workflows - Support approved local AI inference, evaluation, embedding, and retrieval experiments - Write automated tests and participate in code reviews - Participate in technical meetings and clearly communicate progress, blockers, technical decisions, and recommended solutions - Identify opportunities to improve existing implementations rather than simply following predefined tasks ## Required Skills - **2+ years of software development experience** or strong equivalent practical experience - Good JavaScript / TypeScript fundamentals - Backend development experience with **Node.js** - Good knowledge of **SQL and relational databases** - Experience with **PostgreSQL** or a comparable database - Experience developing or integrating REST APIs - Familiarity with Git and standard development workflows - Strong debugging and problem-solving ability - Ability to understand and work within an existing codebase - Comfortable investigating unfamiliar technical problems - Ability to work independently on assigned engineering work - Reliable communication and follow-through - Receptive to technical feedback and willing to learn quickly - Able to clearly explain your own implementation and technical decisions in English ## Local GPU Requirement Candidates must have reliable access to a development computer equipped with an **NVIDIA RTX 4060, RTX 4070, or higher-class NVIDIA GPU**. The GPU will be used for approved local development workloads such as: - Local model inference - Embedding generation and experimentation - Retrieval/RAG experiments - Model and prompt evaluation - Search and re-ranking experiments - Testing AI-assisted application workflows - Other GPU-accelerated engineering and development tasks **Client-sensitive or restricted production data must not be processed on personal hardware unless specifically authorized for that environment.** ## Data, Search & AI You do not need to be a machine-learning researcher. However, familiarity with some of the following is valuable: - RAG / retrieval systems - Embeddings - Vector search - Chunking - Re-ranking - OpenSearch / Elasticsearch - LLM applications - Local/open-source models - Python-based AI tooling - Working with data-science or ML engineers The client team specifically works with data science around re-ranking, chunking, search, and AI-assisted knowledge retrieval. ## Observability & Reliability Experience with production monitoring and troubleshooting is valuable. Relevant technologies include: - OpenTelemetry - Datadog - Prometheus - Grafana - Splunk - Structured logging - Metrics and alerting - Distributed tracing You do not need experience with every tool. What matters is being able to use logs, metrics, traces, and application/database information to investigate real production problems. Data and observability were specifically emphasized during the client engineering discussion. ## Nice to Have - AWS - Kafka or another event-streaming / messaging system - ETL or data-pipeline experience - OpenTelemetry - OpenSearch / Elasticsearch - Python - Docker - GitHub Actions / CI/CD - Distributed systems - Data synchronization and reconciliation - CUDA or GPU-based development - Hugging Face or local LLM tooling - RAG / embeddings / vector databases - Experience collaborating with AI or data-science teams Kafka and OpenTelemetry are valuable for this environment, but they are **not absolute requirements**; the underlying role places greater emphasis on data pipelines, distributed-system concepts, synchronization, troubleshooting, and observability generally. ## What We Value We’re looking for someone who: - Takes ownership of their work - Is dependable and honest - Learns quickly - Accepts technical feedback well - Communicates blockers early - Investigates problems rather than guessing - Is comfortable asking questions when something is unclear - Can explain why they chose a particular technical approach - Is willing to suggest improvements when they identify a better solution The client engineering manager specifically emphasized that engineers should question existing approaches and suggest improvements rather than simply following instructions when they see a better solution. ## About Avenrix Services Avenrix Services supports businesses through project-based engineering and technology delivery across software, backend systems, data, cloud, AI, and related technology initiatives. For this engagement, you’ll contribute to an active enterprise technology project while working with engineering and project leadership. ## Engagement Details **Job Type:** Contract **Level:** Junior–Mid Level **Location:** Remote — India / Pakistan **Compensation:** **$800–$1,200 USD per month**, depending on experience and technical capability **Schedule:** Regular availability with some overlap for technical meetings **Start:** As soon as available