Freelance Senior Backend Engineer (AI)

Location: Remote and Berlin-friendly; Berlin, Germany

Company

hirify.global Labs is an AI-first company within the hirify.global group, building language-learning products that combine research, technology, and product development.

What you will do

• Build and evolve backend services across the learning platform, from API contracts through production operation.
• Design durable API and data contracts with type-safe transformations between APIs, domain models, and persistence.
• Operate owned services by instrumenting them, diagnosing failures, handling incidents, and changing live data safely.
• Work with existing services and collaborate with the engineers who built them.
• Use coding agents in daily development and verify their output before relying on it.

Requirements

• Strong hands-on backend engineering experience with TypeScript and Node.
• Practical AWS experience in a serverless-first environment, including Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, and event streaming.
• Experience designing API and data contracts, modeling domains, and implementing type-safe boundary transformations.
• Production ownership experience, including service instrumentation, failure analysis, safe live-data changes, and incident response.
• Self-sufficiency in unfamiliar codebases and disciplined use of coding agents with output verification.
• Working familiarity with Terraform and CI/CD pipelines; Python experience is welcome.

Nice to have

• Go or Rust experience for performance-critical components.
• Experience with monorepo build systems and shared tooling.
• Public technical work such as open-source contributions or technical writing.

Culture & Benefits

• Hands-on individual-contributor role on a small, fast-moving, agent-first team with structured delivery practices.
• Opportunity to shape responsible AI use in education.
• Collaboration with product, engineering, research, and language experts.
• Flexible working models, learning budgets, and free language learning.
• Inclusive and supportive environment focused on curiosity and growth.

Hiring process

• Initial screening.
• One working session with the hiring manager.