Senior Backend Software Engineer

About Eequ

At first glance, Eequ is a marketplace and booking platform for any learning that takes place outside of school or university. But our vision goes far beyond that.

We believe there’s an alternate future for education — one that is radically decentralised.

Decentralised education means an infinite number of learning experiences can be offered, tried, changed, and reinvented continually. It allows for infinite philosophies, pedagogies, learning styles, and interests. It empowers the smallest initiatives with the same tools as the largest. It fosters diversity, agility, and innovation. Our product is a tool to describe ideas for teaching, search for mentors, coordinate a group, and keep a record.

This approach means more people can earn an income doing what they love and sharing their wisdom with their communities.

It will be a long life of learning.

About the Job

Eequ is a product-led company. Our software drives discovery, adoption, and retention. We have a self-serve model, low-friction onboarding, and user experience is at the centre of our business strategy. As we enter a key growth phase, we’re looking for a backend developer to strengthen our existing systems and help us scale with confidence.

If you’d already been on the team, you might have:

• Created an automated waiting list that manages ticket availability with granular limit rules.
• Implemented data caching for high-traffic API endpoints, reducing database load and improving API response times.
• Optimised database query patterns for performance during sudden booking surges

Join now and you’ll work on:

• Extending our Stripe Custom Connect integration to add user-configurable payouts and membership/instalment plans with Stripe Direct Debit.
• Separating the email service into its own microservice.
• Building a scalable CSV export pipeline that performs reliably as data volumes grow.
• Automating infrastructure and deployments in AWS with IaC and improved CI/CD processes.

You’ll also help address broader technical challenges:

• Determining optimal approaches for handling increasing data volumes.
• Selecting appropriate caching strategies to balance performance and consistency.
• Apply best practise software design patterns to improve code quality, modularity, and long-term maintainability.
• Remove the remaining downtime from our blue-green deployments

We operate as a distributed team, but collaboration remains central. You’ll regularly work with our CEO and design team to clarify requirements, with front-end developers to shape APIs, and with other backend engineers to review code and architecture.

How You Think and Build

• Proven experience building production applications using NestJS
• Ideally has experience with TypeORM and MySQL, with strong skills in relational database design and optimisation
• Comfortable managing and deploying on AWS, with awareness of cloud infrastructure best practices
• Motivated by solving new challenges and continuously learning
• Methodical in researching and implementing solutions when tackling unfamiliar problems
• Brings additional strengths — systems architecture, containerisation, DevOps, or relevant domain expertise
• Above all, takes pride in clean, maintainable, high-quality code that solves real problems effectively

How You Work With Others

We’re a highly productive remote team where communication is everything. That means more than just replying to Slack — it means explaining your thinking clearly, asking good questions, and surfacing challenges early.

We’re looking for someone who:

• Writes and speaks with clarity and precision
• Is comfortable jumping on a whiteboard to diagram and explain ideas
• Can explain technical concepts to both engineers and non-technical teammates
• Is fluent in English to confidently join client calls on topics like security, infrastructure, or product requests
• Develops Request for Comments (RFC) documents to propose new functionalities.

This role isn’t for someone looking to coast or divide attention across multiple commitments. We move quickly and rely on each other to stay focused and dependable.

Team cohesion is important to us. We value people who bring others together, improve communication across functions, and promote optimism and courage.

We care as much about the content of your character as the content of your code reviews.

Your Technical Proficiency

• NestJS: Deep understanding of modules, services, controllers, middleware, and dependency injection
• MySQL (and ideally TypeORM ): Schema design, migrations, relationships, query optimisation
• AWS: Hands-on experience with EC2, RDS, S3, CloudWatch
• Infrastructure: Familiarity with deployment strategies, scaling, and infrastructure as code
• Testing: Comfortable with unit, integration, and end-to-end testing in Node.js environments

How to Apply

To apply, please complete our Typeform as a first step — it helps us respond promptly and consistently.

https://k2oyc9ipykq.typeform.com/to/OmDOsgL6

If selected, the interview will be a live, practical session based on real-world engineering challenges. We’ll walk through a couple of problems recently tackled by our team and ask how you’d approach them to help us understand your thinking, judgement, and communication.

Eequ is an equal opportunities employer. We welcome applications from all backgrounds and walks of life. However, we are only able to consider candidates based in the UK or EEA with an existing right to work.