Lead (Node.js and API) | Dallas, Texas

Photon•Dallas, TX

4d•$46,000 - $161,000•Onsite

About The Position

The Digital API team is looking for a hands-on Architect with deep Node.js/TypeScript expertise to design and deliver domain-driven microservices for customer-facing digital experiences. This role involves owning greenfield builds from zero-to-production, leading engineers by example (coding approximately 70% of the time), and driving cross-team triage while keeping leadership proactively informed.

Requirements

8+ years backend engineering (or equivalent impact), 3+ years technical leadership on product teams.
Expert-level Node.js/TypeScript with proven delivery of domain-driven microservices at scale.
Strong grasp of DDD (entities/aggregates/bounded contexts), event-driven architectures, and microservice patterns (saga, outbox, circuit breaker).
Designed secure, resilient public APIs used by web/mobile clients; deep understanding of authN/authZ (OAuth2/OIDC), secrets, and TLS.
Production experience with Kubernetes and cloud-native deployment, CI/CD, and observability (metrics, traces, logs, SLOs).
Demonstrated success leading triage/incident response and driving RCAs to lasting improvements.
Outstanding communication able to simplify complex trade-offs, tell a delivery story, and keep partners aligned.
Bias for action: you go the extra mile, anticipate the next two steps, and ship high-quality software.

Nice To Haves

Experience in telecom (ordering, provisioning, billing, identity) or large consumer digital platforms.
API gateways (Apigee/Kong), rate limiting/quotas, multi-tenant patterns.
Performance tuning, capacity planning, and cost optimization in cloud environments.

Responsibilities

Design & build domain-driven, event-aware microservices in Node.js/TypeScript (Express/Fastify/NestJS) with clean, testable code.
Architect greenfield systems: service boundaries, data models, REST APIs, event streams, CI/CD, observability, and runtime topology.
Set API standards: versioning, OpenAPI/Swagger, pagination, error contracts, resiliency patterns (timeouts, retries, circuit breakers).
Own production readiness: SLOs, dashboards, alerting, runbooks; lead incident triage/bridge calls and drive blameless RCAs.
Collaborate across teams (web, mobile, data, security, ops) to unblock work, sequence dependencies, and land integrated releases.
Communicate proactively with leadership: crisp status, risk/mitigation, dependencies, and measurable outcomes.
Raise the bar: code reviews, engineering best practices, mentoring, pair programming, tech talks, and documentation.
Think two steps ahead: anticipate edge cases, scaling, operability, and cost; recommend pragmatic sequencing and trade-offs.