Backend Engineer

Please read the job description carefully and fill out this short form, to apply for the role: https://forms.gle/3Z41K2KBgcREXShE7

The Product Highway is an AI-native product strategy and engineering firm that partners with businesses from the earliest spark of an idea all the way through to enterprise scale. We grew from zero to multi-million ARR within our first year, working with clients across India, APAC, Europe, and North America.

The conventional product/software industry is coming to an end. The line between product development and business development is disappearing. The best talent won’t spend a career maintaining one product — they’ll operate as forward-deployed product managers and engineers, building businesses end to end in small, high-leverage teams, one after another. That’s the vision we’re building toward.

AI got very good at the how — shipping code faster than ever. But almost nothing has changed in the what: deciding what to build, why, and in what order. That’s where we live. We believe software is an approximation of the real world, and what matters isn’t lines of code or sprint velocity — it’s whether the solution actually maps to how a business works, how customers think, and how value gets created.

From in-house AI project managers to near-universal adoption of tools like Cursor and Claude, we’ve rethought every conventional process from first principles. AI isn’t a feature we offer — it’s how we think, build, and deliver. The result: legacy systems rebuilt in under 6 months, enterprise platforms built in under 3, mobile applications shipped in under 1.
We only take on problems we find genuinely interesting and worthy of being solved, and we refuse to ship anything we wouldn’t stand behind. Every hire gets us closer to that standard.

Who we’re looking for

Regardless of role, every person at TPH shares these traits:

• End-to-end owners. You own outcomes, not tasks. If something you’re responsible for falls through a crack, that’s on you — not because someone assigned it, but because you wouldn’t have it any other way.
• Clear, direct communicators. Bad news doesn’t get better with age. Context doesn’t transfer through vague Slack messages. You surface problems early and communicate with precision.
• Uncompromising on quality. You have a quality bar that’s yours, not your manager’s. You won’t ship something you wouldn’t stand behind, even under deadline pressure.
• AI-obsessed. You see AI as how work gets done, not a nice-to-have. If you’re still doing something manually that AI could handle, you feel that as friction, not normalcy.
• Structured thinkers. When faced with an ambiguous problem, you break it down, reason through the trade-offs, and arrive at a position — not wait for someone to tell you the answer.
• Experienced enough to use AI systematically. You have enough depth in your craft that AI makes you dangerous, not dependent. You direct it, evaluate its output, and know when it’s wrong.

Why we’re hiring

TPH builds products for clients across industries — fintech, ecommerce, SaaS, enterprise data platforms, consumer apps. Every one of these needs a strong backend. APIs that don’t break under load. Data models that actually map to business reality. Integrations that work reliably with third-party systems. Infrastructure that scales without someone babysitting it at 2 AM.

This is not a project-specific hire. You’ll be deployed across different client projects over time — sometimes building a new system from scratch, sometimes restructuring a legacy mess, sometimes scaling something that’s already working but creaking. The common thread is that you’re the person responsible for making sure the backend is solid, fast, and well-architected.

We’re looking for someone who’s primarily a backend engineer but has the range to work across the stack when needed. You shouldn’t be the person who files a ticket because the frontend needs a small API change — you should be the person who just fixes it. Full-stack capability isn’t the job description, but full-stack willingness is non-negotiable.

What you’ll do

• Design and build backend systems from scratch — APIs, data models, business logic, authentication, background jobs, integrations with third-party services
• Own the architecture decisions on your projects — database design, API contracts, caching strategy, queue architecture, service boundaries. You’re not waiting for a tech lead to hand you a spec
• Write production code in Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS) depending on the project — we’re not dogmatic about stacks, we pick what fits
• Work with PostgreSQL, Redis, message queues, and cloud infrastructure (AWS/GCP) — you should be comfortable with the full backend ecosystem, not just application code
• Build and maintain integrations — payment gateways, CRMs, ERPs, LLM APIs, analytics platforms. Every client has a different landscape, and you’ll need to connect to it reliably
• Step across the stack when it makes sense — fix a frontend bug, adjust a React component, wire up a new page. Not your primary job, but you don’t let a small frontend change become a blocker
• Ship features end-to-end — from understanding the product requirement to deploying to production. You work with the Product Manager to understand what’s needed, but you own the technical execution
• Write code that other people can work with — clean APIs, clear naming, proper error handling, meaningful tests. You’re building systems that will be maintained by teams, not hacking together prototypes
• Debug and fix production issues fast — you’re comfortable reading logs, tracing errors through distributed systems, and shipping a fix without panicking
• Work across multiple client contexts over time — different domains, different stacks, different team compositions. You adapt quickly and bring best practices from one project to the next

Must-haves

• 4+ years building backend systems in production — APIs, databases, background jobs, integrations. Not just CRUD apps, but systems with real complexity
• Strong in Python (FastAPI/Django) or Node.js (Express/NestJS) — and willing to pick up the other when a project calls for it
• Deep comfort with PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimization, migrations, indexing. This is where most of the real backend work lives
• Can make architecture decisions independently — when to use a queue vs. a cron job, when to denormalize, when to split a service, when to keep it simple. You don’t need someone to tell you the right pattern
• Has built and maintained third-party integrations — payment APIs, CRM systems, external data sources. You know that integrations are where half the complexity lives
• Willingness and ability to work across the stack — you don’t need to be a React expert, but you should be able to fix a frontend issue, adjust an API response for a UI need, or wire up a basic page without blocking the team
• Has deployed and operated production systems — CI/CD, Docker, cloud infrastructure. You ship your code, you don’t hand it off to a DevOps team and forget about it
• Comfortable working in a services environment — different projects, different clients, different codebases. You ramp up fast and don’t need weeks of onboarding to be productive

Strong pluses

• Has built AI/ML-adjacent backend systems — LLM integrations, feature pipelines, model serving infrastructure, vector databases, embedding retrieval
• Experience with both Python and Node.js ecosystems — being genuinely comfortable in two backend stacks makes you far more deployable across projects
• Has worked with React or Next.js enough to be dangerous — not just “I’ve seen frontend code” but “I can build a page, debug a component, and ship a fix”
• Has designed multi-tenant architectures or built systems that serve multiple clients on shared infrastructure
• Experience with real-time systems — WebSockets, event-driven architectures, streaming data
• Has worked in a services or consulting environment before and understands the pace, context-switching, and client-facing nature of the work

AI-native expectations

• Uses Cursor or Claude Code as primary development environment — ships production code through AI-assisted workflows daily
• Maintains CLAUDE.md and .cursorrules per project as living documents — AI tools know your stack, conventions, and constraints
• Plan-first development: specs the work before generating code. AI reads existing code first, you approve the plan, then execute
• Structured AI-assisted debugging: hypotheses first, targeted investigation, scoped fix with explicit boundaries
• AI-assisted code review: git diff scoping, automated review against project rules, manual review before every commit
• Uses AI to generate tests, write documentation, and scaffold boilerplate — then reviews and refines. You never ship AI output without reading it

Not the right fit if

• You only want to work on one product for years — this is a services role. You’ll build across multiple domains and the variety is a feature, not a bug
• You refuse to touch frontend code — we need backend engineers who can cross the stack when it makes sense, not people who file tickets for a one-line CSS fix
• You need detailed specs for everything — you’ll work with PMs, but you’re expected to make technical decisions independently and propose solutions, not just implement them
• You’ve only worked on internal tools or side projects — we need experience shipping production systems for real users with real stakes
• You optimize for clever code over readable code — other engineers need to maintain what you build, on projects you might not be on anymore
• You don’t use AI tools daily in your current work