Backend Engineering Intern

About Timbre

Timbre is an audio and video editing product used across web, Android and iOS. Users can edit and transform media, generate AI powered outputs, manage their assets, and use cloud based processing features.

A significant part of the product runs through our backend, including media processing workflows, AI operations, storage, subscriptions, credits, notifications and integrations with our web and mobile apps.

The Role

You will work closely with the engineering team on Timbre's production backend.

This is not an internship where you will only work on isolated practice tasks. You will contribute to real product features, fix bugs, work with existing systems and gradually take ownership of backend tasks that ship to users.

We are looking for someone who is highly motivated, learns quickly and is comfortable figuring things out instead of waiting for step by step instructions.

You do not need prior experience with every technology we use. Strong fundamentals, problem solving ability and the ability to learn quickly matter more.

What You Will Work On

• Build and maintain REST APIs used by our web, Android and iOS applications.
• Work on backend systems for user accounts, assets, subscriptions, credits and notifications.
• Work with PostgreSQL databases, models and migrations.
• Help build and maintain asynchronous processing and background job workflows.
• Integrate third party APIs and AI/media processing services.
• Work with cloud storage and large media uploads.
• Debug backend and production issues and identify their root causes.
• Add validation, error handling, logging and tests to existing and new functionality.
• Work with frontend and mobile developers when features have backend dependencies.
• Read and understand an existing production codebase rather than only building projects from scratch.

Tech Stack

Node.js, JavaScript, Express.js, PostgreSQL, Sequelize, REST APIs, Git/GitHub, Docker, Queues and background workers, Azure and AWS.

You are not expected to already know the entire stack. We care more about whether you understand backend fundamentals and can quickly learn unfamiliar systems.

Requirements

• Good JavaScript fundamentals, including asynchronous programming, promises and async/await.
• Basic experience building backend APIs using Node.js, Express or a similar backend framework.
• Understanding of REST APIs, HTTP methods, status codes and request/response handling.
• Basic understanding of relational databases and SQL.
• Understanding of authentication and common backend concepts.
• Comfortable using Git and GitHub.
• Ability to debug problems instead of only implementing happy path functionality.
• At least one meaningful backend project that you can explain in detail, including the decisions you made and problems you encountered.
• Ability to read documentation and learn technologies independently.
• Clear written communication and willingness to ask questions when something is unclear.

Previous professional experience is not required.

Good to Have

• PostgreSQL or another relational database
• Sequelize or another ORM
• Experience with queues, workers or asynchronous processing
• Docker
• AWS, Azure or another cloud platform
• Authentication using JWT or OAuth
• Payment or subscription integrations such as Stripe
• Object storage such as S3 or Azure Blob Storage
• Automated testing for backend applications
• Experience deploying a backend project
• Contributions to open source projects or production applications

None of these are mandatory.

What We Value

We are less interested in how many frameworks you have listed on your resume and more interested in how you approach unfamiliar problems.

We are looking for someone who:

• Learns quickly and actively looks for answers.
• Has strong problem solving and debugging instincts.
• Takes ownership of tasks instead of requiring constant follow up.
• Is comfortable receiving feedback and adapting quickly.
• Communicates blockers early.
• Pays attention to edge cases and failure scenarios.
• Can understand why an existing system works the way it does before changing it.
• Is interested in growing into a strong backend engineer while working on a real production system.

A computer science degree, previous internship experience, prior cloud experience and knowledge of our exact backend stack are all optional.