Platform Architect & Backend Lead

We are seeking a senior engineer to join our team in building a multi-tenant, hardware-agnostic IoT platform from the ground up. This role uniquely combines system architecture design with hands-on backend development in a fast-paced, early-stage environment. The ideal candidate will be deeply involved in both high-level architectural decisions and day-to-day coding, while also managing cloud infrastructure as an interim DevOps lead until the team scales. This position requires autonomy, technical expertise, and a disciplined approach to remote work.

Key Responsibilities

Platform Architecture:
- Design the complete end-to-end IoT platform architecture, including device connectivity, MQTT/protocol ingestion, stream processing, time-series storage, REST/GraphQL APIs, and real-time WebSocket delivery.
- Define a multi-tenant data model ensuring strict data isolation, tenant-scoped API tokens, and row-level security.
- Architect the device lifecycle system covering provisioning, X.509/JWT authentication, device registry, status tracking, and decommissioning.
- Develop a protocol abstraction layer to normalize MQTT, Modbus, OPC-UA, CoAP, and HTTP devices into a unified internal data model.
- Create a configurable rule engine for event-condition-action rules enabling alerts, automations, and integrations without customer coding.
- Plan OTA firmware update management with secure delivery, versioning, rollback, and fleet orchestration.
- Maintain thorough documentation through Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) for all major technical choices.
- Design scalable architecture to support growth from pilot (100 devices) to production (500,000+ devices) without structural rework.

Backend Development:
- Build core platform services from scratch, including device management, telemetry ingestion, rule engine, notification/alerting, OTA updates, and multi-tenant API gateway.
- Develop REST and GraphQL APIs with full OpenAPI specifications, version-controlled from day one.
- Implement WebSocket and Server-Sent Events (SSE) endpoints for real-time telemetry delivery to web and mobile clients.
- Build device command-and-control features with acknowledgement, retry logic, and timeout handling.
- Implement a device shadow service to maintain the last-known state accessible even when devices are offline.
- Write comprehensive unit, integration, and load tests to ensure no service reaches staging without test coverage.
- Own service reliability by defining Service Level Objectives (SLOs), creating alerting runbooks, and participating in on-call incident response.

Cloud Infrastructure (Interim):
- Provision and manage AWS environments (development, staging, production) using Terraform, avoiding manual console operations.
- Configure AWS IoT Core components including MQTT endpoints, topic namespaces, rules engine, and certificate management.
- Set up CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions for backend services.
- Implement CloudWatch monitoring, log aggregation, and automated health alerts.
- Manage IAM policies ensuring least-privilege access and no shared credentials.
- Document infrastructure thoroughly for smooth handoff to a dedicated DevOps engineer in the future.

Required Qualifications
- 7–12 years of software or systems engineering experience, with at least 4 years focused on building IoT platform backends or connected product infrastructure.
- Expert-level, hands-on experience with AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub in production environments (non-negotiable).
- Deep MQTT protocol knowledge (v3.1 and v5.0), including topic hierarchy, QoS levels, retained messages, Last Will & Testament, and broker sizing/clustering (non-negotiable).
- Proficiency in Python and Node.js/TypeScript for backend development; Go is a strong advantage.
- Experience with time-series databases such as InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, or AWS Timestream.
- Skilled in infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation.
- Strong understanding of multi-tenant SaaS backend architecture, including data isolation and tenant-scoped access control.
- Practical security knowledge covering TLS/mTLS, X.509 certificates, OAuth 2.0, JWT, and secrets management (e.g., Vault or AWS Secrets Manager).
- Experience with message brokers or streaming platforms such as Kafka, RabbitMQ, AWS Kinesis, or AWS IoT Rules Engine.
- Proven ability to work autonomously at a senior level, making decisions, documenting rationale, and proactively flagging risks in a remote work setting.

Preferred Qualifications and Benefits
- Familiarity with industrial protocols like Modbus TCP/RTU, OPC-UA, BACnet.
- Experience deploying and operating MQTT brokers such as EMQX, HiveMQ, or VerneMQ.
- Knowledge of edge computing runtimes like AWS Greengrass v2, Azure IoT Edge, or Balena.
- Exposure to digital twin frameworks such as AWS IoT TwinMaker or Azure Digital Twins.
- Experience with container orchestration platforms like Kubernetes or ECS, anticipating future migration phases.
- Contributions to open-source IoT projects or published technical writing on platform architecture.

This role offers the opportunity to lead the design and development of a cutting-edge IoT platform with significant technical ownership and impact. If you thrive in a dynamic environment where architecture and coding go hand in hand, and you have the expertise to build scalable, secure, and reliable IoT backends, we encourage you to apply.