## Role Summary

Howdy is looking for a Lead Platform Engineer to take ownership of the backend and platform foundations behind a multi-app hiring marketplace. This role is hands-on and close to product: you will lead backend engineers while improving the reliability, scalability, and developer experience of the systems that power our Partner portal, Admin portal, Candidate portal, and background worker processes.

This is not a pure infrastructure-only role. Today, platform work lives inside a Node.js and Next.js monorepo and spans application architecture, asynchronous job execution, database performance, external integrations, observability, CI/CD, and production operations. A strong candidate should be comfortable moving between code-level fixes, system design, and operational improvements.

## What You Will Inherit

- A `pnpm` / Turborepo monorepo

- Four main runtime surfaces:

- A customer-facing Partner portal

- An internal Admin / EP portal

- A candidate-facing portal

- With BullMQ workers and scheduled jobs

- Shared backend domain logic in it's own package core dependency

- Shared observability tooling in a separate packaged dependency

- A mixed JavaScript and TypeScript codebase, with newer typed modules living alongside legacy service layers that are being incrementally modernized

- A backend architecture that mixes Next.js App Router API routes with older shared service modules under it's own packaged module.

- Next.js 13 + React 18 applications, plus Node.js worker processes

- MySQL + Prisma as the main transactional data layer

- Redis / Redis Stack for queues, sessions, distributed locks, and institution indexing with RediSearch

- BullMQ jobs handling Salesforce syncs, email sync, CV extraction and AI enrichment, Zoho token refresh, institution indexing, notifications, and scheduled maintenance workflows

- Datadog-based tracing, metrics, and structured logging, plus Sentry for exception capture

- Docker-based builds, GitHub Actions CI/CD, Heroku-based deployment targets, multi-environment deployment flow (`develop` -> `uat` -> `main`), and production containers that rely on Cloud SQL Proxy and runtime env injection

- Critical third-party integrations including Salesforce, Zoho, Stripe, Plaid, Google Cloud Storage, email delivery, and OpenAI-powered CV extraction and prompt workflows

## What Platform Engineering Means Here

In this codebase, platform engineering is about making the product safer and easier to ship:

- Improve cross-service reliability and failure recovery

- Harden sync pipelines and background jobs

- Reduce database bottlenecks, pool exhaustion, and long-tail latency

- Strengthen observability, health/readiness checks, and alerting

- Improve local development, testing, deployment, and shared backend abstractions

- Help the team move a mixed legacy/newer codebase toward more consistent patterns

This role is closer to application platform and production reliability than to a Kubernetes-only infrastructure role. The biggest wins will come from improving the systems already inside the repo: shared backend services, sync jobs, data access patterns, and the release pipeline that supports them.

## Key Responsibilities

- Lead and mentor a small team of backend engineers, setting a high bar for technical quality, collaboration, and accountability.

- Own the reliability of the platform surfaces that support the business: API routes, shared backend services, queue workers, scheduled jobs, and production integrations.

- Improve the architecture of a multi-app Node.js monorepo that combines Next.js App Router APIs, shared backend services, and asynchronous worker processes.

- Drive performance and failure-mode analysis across Prisma/MySQL, Redis, BullMQ, and external APIs such as Salesforce and Zoho.

- Strengthen observability by expanding structured logging, tracing, metrics, service checks, and actionable dashboards and alerts.

- Improve queue design, retry policies, idempotency, watermarking, locking, batching, and backpressure handling for sync-heavy workflows.

- Lead platform improvements around CI/CD, Docker builds, environment management, release safety, and multi-environment deployments.

- Build or refine internal tooling and shared abstractions that make backend development safer and faster for product teams.

- Partner closely with VP of Product and cross-functional leads to shape technical direction, platform investments, and engineering standards.

- Stay hands-on in the code, especially in areas like `packages/core`, `apps/workers`, shared APIs, data access patterns, and production diagnostics.

## Examples of the Systems You May Work On

- Salesforce sync pipelines with watermarking, distributed Redis locks, and Datadog metrics

- BullMQ jobs for candidate/profile sync, email sync, anniversary notifications, institution indexing, and AI CV extraction

- Health and readiness checks for MySQL, Redis, AI services, and Zoho

- Prisma connection pool monitoring, slow-query detection, and resilience work around P2024 timeout scenarios

- Redis-backed sessions, worker queues, and RediSearch indexes

- OpenAI-powered structured CV extraction and AI-assisted prompt generation

- Shared file upload flows using Google Cloud Storage signed policies

- Revenue-critical workflows covered by Playwright across Admin -> Partner -> hire flows

## Main Skills and Qualifications

- 7+ years of backend or platform engineering experience in Node.js environments, ideally in SaaS, marketplace, or high-change product companies.

- 2+ years leading or mentoring engineers as a Tech Lead, Staff Engineer, Principal, or Platform Lead.

- Strong experience designing reliable distributed systems and operating production workloads with multiple external dependencies.

- Deep hands-on experience with Node.js and strong fluency in TypeScript and JavaScript.

- Strong understanding of relational databases and query performance; Prisma/MySQL experience is highly relevant.

- Experience using Redis for more than caching, including queues, locking, sessions, or search/indexing.

- Experience operating asynchronous job systems, worker fleets, or event/sync pipelines with idempotency and retry concerns.

- Strong observability instincts across metrics, logging, tracing, alerting, and production debugging.

- Experience analyzing failure modes and improving resilience in systems that depend on third-party APIs and background processing.

- Experience improving CI/CD, containerized deployments, and developer workflows in a monorepo environment.

- Comfortable working in a mixed legacy/newer codebase and improving architecture incrementally without slowing delivery.

- Strong communication skills and the ability to work closely with product, design, and other technical leads.

## Nice to Have

- Experience with Salesforce, Zoho, Stripe, Plaid, or similar SaaS integrations

- Experience with BullMQ, Redis Stack / RediSearch, or similar job orchestration systems

- Experience with Datadog, Sentry, or similar observability tooling

- Experience with Next.js monorepos and shared package architectures

- Experience with OpenAI or AI-enrichment pipelines in production

- Experience with Heroku, GitHub Actions, Docker, or similar delivery pipelines

- Experience modernizing JavaScript codebases toward stronger typing and clearer service boundaries

## Success in This Role Looks Like

- Faster diagnosis of production issues and fewer unknown-state failures

- Safer, more observable sync and worker pipelines

- Better database and queue behavior under load

- Clearer ownership boundaries across shared platform code

- Improved deployment confidence and release hygiene

- A backend team that ships faster because the platform is easier to trust

## Why This Role Appeals to the Right Candidate

- The scope is broad and meaningful: product architecture, platform reliability, external integrations, and team leadership all sit in the same role.

- The work is practical, not theoretical. Many of the biggest wins are inside real systems that already run in production.

- It is a strong fit for someone who enjoys both platform engineering and backend problem-solving, especially in startup environments where reliability, delivery, and technical judgment all matter.