Essential

• 5+ years of professional backend development experience
• Strong Node.js + TypeScript skills — this is your primary tool
• Solid experience with WebSockets / socket.io
• Good grasp of REST API design: auth, error handling, versioning
• Comfortable with Redis (pub/sub, caching, queues)
• SQL and relational database experience — AWS RDS / MySQL preferred
• Experience with message/job queues (Bee Queue, SQS, or similar)
• Solid logging and observability practice (structured logs, metrics, alerting)
• Proven experience with AWS services and a real understanding of AWS networking
• Comfortable working at pace in a small, high-trust team

Nice to Have

• Exposure to IoT systems — firmware interaction, physical device constraints, debugging connectivity
• Experience with real-time mobile app communications
• API versioning and backward compatibili...