Backend/Full-Stack Engineer – Platform Hardening & Optimization

📍 Dubai, UAE (or remote in similar timezone)

💰 $25 USD/hour

⏰ Full-time, high-intensity (50-60 hrs/week expected)

🚀 Start: Immediate

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Compensation Breakdown

Hourly: $25 USD Weekly: $1,250 - $1,500 (50-60 hrs) Monthly: $5,400 - $6,500 USD (~AED 20,000 - 24,000) Yearly: $65,000 - $78,000 USD (~AED 240,000 - 285,000)

Paid reliably. No chasing invoices.

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The Opportunity

Cofound is a venture platform that takes founders from idea to revenue-generating company. We're not a startup building a pitch deck—we're launching in March 2026 with real founders, real money, and real infrastructure.

We have a working platform. 15,000+ lines of TypeScript. 250+ tests. Fastify backend, Next.js frontend, PostgreSQL, GCP infrastructure, and a serious integration stack.

We don't need someone to build it. We need someone to perfect it.

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What You'll Do

You'll own the backend and make it bulletproof:

• Harden everything – Find the edge cases, race conditions, and failure modes before users do
• Optimize relentlessly – Query performance, API response times, database indexes, caching strategies
• Clean up technical debt – Refactor the code that works into code that's beautiful
• Strengthen security – Rate limiting, input validation, auth edge cases, audit logging
• Improve observability – Logging, monitoring, alerting—know what's happening before it breaks
• Own uptime – You'll be on pager duty. When something breaks at 3am, you fix it
• Write tests – Not because you have to, but because you can't sleep knowing something isn't covered
• Document thoroughly – Make the codebase understandable to the next engineer

You won't be designing new features from Figma. You'll be the person who makes sure the features we have actually work at scale, under pressure, in production.

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Tech Stack

Backend: Fastify 5, TypeScript, Prisma ORM Database: PostgreSQL 16 Frontend: Next.js 15, React 19 (you'll touch this sometimes) Infra: GCP Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, Cloud Storage, Terraform Testing: Vitest Monorepo: Turborepo, pnpm

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Integrations You'll Work With

• Clerk – Authentication, user management
• Stripe – Payments, billing
• Plaid – Bank account connections
• DocuSign – Document signing, agreements
• Persona – ID verification, KYC
• Knock – Notifications (email, in-app, push)
• Ably – Real-time WebSocket events
• Twilio – SMS, WhatsApp, 2FA
• Wistia – Video hosting, transcription
• Cal.com – Interview scheduling
• Intercom – Customer support
• Google Cloud – Storage, Pub/Sub, Cloud Run, Secret Manager

You'll need to understand webhooks, OAuth flows, and how these systems fail.

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Who You Are

Non-negotiables:

• Years of production experience with this exact stack—TypeScript, Node.js, PostgreSQL, GCP
• Not "I've done a tutorial." Years. In production. At scale
• You've operated systems on GCP specifically—Cloud Run, Cloud SQL, Pub/Sub, IAM
• You understand SQL deeply—indexes, query plans, transactions, connection pooling
• You've been on-call before. You know what it means to be paged at 3am and fix it
• You're meticulous to the point of being annoying about it
• You can read a codebase and understand it without hand-holding
• You're in Dubai or a compatible timezone (GMT+4 ± 2 hours)

What separates good from great:

• You've hardened a system before, not just built one
• You think about what happens when things fail, not just when they work
• You've debugged production incidents and know what observability you wished you had
• You read code for fun. You refactor code that "works fine" because it bothers you
• You write tests before you're asked to
• You've integrated with payment systems, identity verification, or banking APIs

Mindset:

• You're at a point in your life where you want to go deep on something
• You're not looking for work-life balance right now—you're looking for craft and intensity
• You want ownership, not tickets
• You'd rather understand a system completely than ship features blindly
• You're comfortable being on pager duty because you trust your own work

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What You Get

✓ Ownership – This becomes your codebase. You'll know it better than anyone

✓ Direct impact – Your work goes live to real founders building real companies

✓ Learning – Complex integrations, event-driven architecture, production systems

✓ Growth – As Cofound scales, so does your role

✓ Reliable pay – AED 20,000-24,000/month, paid on time, every time

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What You Don't Get

✗ Hand-holding or micromanagement

✗ A slow ramp-up period

✗ Permission to ship sloppy code

✗ Sympathy for "it works on my machine"

✗ The option to ignore your pager

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The Process

1. We find you – If your profile looks right, we'll reach out via LinkedIn DM
2. Application – We'll send you a Google Form + short video explaining the role
3. Technical test – If your application stands out, we invite you to a paid test in Slack. Same test our current senior engineer passed. Real work, not LeetCode
4. Hire – If we like your test, you're in

We're not posting this everywhere. We're reaching out to specific people who look like the right fit. If you're reading this, we're already interested.

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Final Note

This isn't a job for someone who wants to coast. It's a job for someone who wants to master a platform, own it completely, and take pride in knowing that when founders trust Cofound with their companies, the system underneath is rock solid.

You'll be on pager duty. You'll work long hours. You'll refactor code that already works because "works" isn't good enough.

If that sounds like work to you, this isn't the role.

If that sounds like exactly what you want to be doing right now, we'll be in touch.