Backend Engineer
About product:
At Chowdeck, we’re transforming how food delivery works across Africa. We help food vendors deliver meals seamlessly while giving customers an easy, reliable platform to order from their favorite restaurants. Between customers and vendors are our riders — the superstars who make every delivery happen.
Our mission is to connect people through technology, putting smiles on faces and ensuring satisfaction in bellies — one meal at a time.
About the role:
We’re looking for an experienced Senior Backend Engineer to help build and scale the API infrastructure powering Chowdeck’s ecosystem, including customer, vendor, and rider applications.
You’ll work on high-load, real-time production systems, tackling complex challenges around scalability, performance, reliability, and system architecture.
We’re looking for an engineer who can take ownership of technical decisions, evaluate architectural trade-offs, and design pragmatic solutions that scale with business growth.
Main responsibilities:
- Design, build, and maintain scalable backend APIs and services.
- Architect and optimize high-load systems to support increasing traffic and business growth.
- Identify performance bottlenecks and improve system scalability, reliability, and efficiency.
- Make architectural decisions based on technical trade-offs, performance requirements, and infrastructure costs.
- Troubleshoot and resolve complex production issues across services.
- Collaborate with Product, Frontend, and UX teams to deliver reliable, high-quality features.
- Identify and reduce technical debt by improving architecture, engineering standards, tooling, and processes.
Your experience (Must Have):
- 6+ years of professional backend development experience, with strong expertise in Node.js and JavaScript.
- Strong hands-on experience with MySQL, Redis, and cloud platforms (AWS or GCP).
- Proven experience designing, building, or scaling high-load production systems serving large numbers of users or processing significant traffic.
- Strong system design skills, including data modeling, identifying potential bottlenecks, handling edge cases, and designing scalable architectures.
- Solid understanding of architectural trade-offs, with the ability to justify technical decisions based on scalability, performance, complexity, and cost.
- Practical experience with scaling challenges, including database optimization, caching strategies, and designing systems to handle significant traffic growth.
- Hands-on experience troubleshooting production issues, such as performance degradation, system failures, infrastructure bottlenecks, or complex migrations.
- Ability to adapt technical solutions to changing requirements and constraints without unnecessary overengineering.
- Strong ownership mindset, independent problem-solving skills, and clear communication with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
Bonus:
- Experience with high-availability systems, distributed architectures, or event-driven systems.
- Previous experience in fast-growing startups or high-traffic product companies.
- Experience with infrastructure cost optimization and production monitoring.
- Mentoring or technical leadership experience.
What’s in it for you?
- Join a fast-growing tech company with real impact across Africa.
- Be part of a culture that values innovation, ownership, and continuous improvement.
- Work directly with the customer, in a culture of ownership and impact.
- 20 fully paid vacation days.
- 15 fully paid sick leaves.
- Paid public holidays.
- Compensation for health insurance and sports club membership (after trial period).
- Remote work flexibility.