Senior Backend Engineer

About the company

90 Seconds provides an end-to-end solution to manage all aspects of high-quality video creation via a global video creation platform for Brands and Creators. Our sights are set a whole lot higher and we're looking for that determined someone who’s obsessive about building great products that change users' experience for the better.

• Be the Customer. Know, listen and live the experience of the customer. Think, talk, see, and ask like the customer. Then create value and build trust with the customer.
• We are live. Our team is nimble, focused, and ready to act together now to create value for the customer, that is live in over 100 countries.
• Own it. We are all owners. We focus on the core problems and opportunities that drive sustained success. We agree on a path, own the outcome, and do whatever it takes together.
• Focus on what matters. Know the goals, know the numbers, know what matters, and prioritize. Visualize it for everyone so that you can align the team and make it happen.
• Be Courageous. Have the courage to drive change for the business and don’t be afraid to take a risk and feel the burn.

Your tasks

We are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer who will oversee the creation and delivery of the 90 Seconds products. In this role, you'll be a part of a collaborative team of empowered and accountable people focused on the same vision and priorities, solving the right problems for 90 Seconds users.

• Own the backend and infrastructure. Look after reliability, performance, monitoring and incident response for a platform that's live and growing.
• Own security. Cover identity and access, multi-tenant data isolation, secrets and audit, and make sure we stand up to enterprise security reviews.
• Grow the platform. Work with the team to design and ship new capabilities, and keep the architecture clean as it grows.
• Lead and mentor. Be the senior engineering voice on the team, review designs and code, and set standards. There's room to grow into an engineering manager role.
• Push our AI-first development further. Improve how we work with Claude Code and agents, so a small team can keep moving fast without breaking things.
• Communicate across the company. Explain technical trade-offs in plain English to founders, ops, finance, sales and customers, and write clear plans and incident reports.

Requirements

• An excellent communicator, both written and spoken. This matters as much as your technical skills. You explain complex things simply, write clearly and briefly, and are comfortable working with anyone in the company. Excellent English.
• Based in New Zealand, with the right to work here.
• 10+ years of senior backend experience building and running production systems.
• Strong infrastructure experience, ideally on GCP: containers, managed Postgres, event-driven systems, Terraform, CI/CD and observability.
• Security built in from the start, not bolted on afterwards.
• Real, hands-on experience developing with AI. You already work with Claude Code or similar, and you know how to keep quality high when agents write most of the code.
• Strong TypeScript and Node.js, with GraphQL and relational data modelling.
• Nice to Have
• Experience leading engineers.
• Marketplace or B2B SaaS background.
• Payments experience.
• Building LLM-powered features and agents in production.