Junior / Intermediate Backend Engineer
Full-Stack Capable · Vancouver, BC — hybrid, 3 days in office · Full-time, Permanent
Node.js · MongoDB · SQL · AWS · Docker · Terraform · AI Pipelines
About the Company
Aires is an AI-native marketing and sales platform transforming how new homes are sold. Built specifically for the pre-sale real estate industry, Aires empowers developers and brokerages to manage the entire buyer journey — from lead generation and qualification to contract management and post-sale success — all in one connected ecosystem.
Founded by a team that has sold over 160,000 homes worldwide, Aires combines deep industry expertise with cutting-edge AI to streamline workflows and enhance customer experiences. Today, Aires partners with some of the world's leading real estate developers, including Grosvenor, to modernize how homes are marketed and sold.
We're a high-growth PropTech startup that prides itself on its culture, collaboration, and people. Our team is passionate, fast-moving, and driven by impact — building technology that's reshaping one of the world's largest industries.
About the Role
Aires is looking for a Junior / Intermediate Backend Engineer to join our fast-growing team. You'll work directly with the Co-Founders and senior engineers on the systems that power our platform: multi-tenant APIs, background job pipelines, AI-driven features, and the AWS infrastructure they run on.
This is a backend-focused role with real infrastructure ownership. You won't just write application code — you'll help provision it, deploy it, monitor it, and scale it. You'll also build AI pipelines that put LLMs, embeddings, and vector search to work on real customer problems.
We develop AI-first. Agentic coding tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) are part of our daily workflow, and we're looking for someone who already works this way — using AI to move faster while applying strong engineering judgment to what it produces.
It's an ideal role for an engineer early in their career who wants to grow beyond CRUD work into distributed systems, infrastructure-as-code, and applied AI, supported by hands-on mentorship. Based in our Vancouver, BC office, this role requires a minimum in-office presence of three days per week.
What You'll Do
- Own backend features end to end: design → API → tests → deploy → monitor
- Build and maintain Node.js/Express services backed by MongoDB (Mongoose) and Redis, applying SOLID principles and clean abstractions
- Design background job pipelines and workers (BullMQ) for syncing, messaging, and data processing at scale, with attention to atomicity and data integrity (ACID)
- Build AI pipelines: LLM integrations, prompt workflows, embeddings, and vector search features
- Use AI development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, Copilot) as force multipliers — and critically review what they generate
- Work in AWS daily — compute, S3, networking, IAM, secrets management
- Contribute to our Terraform-managed infrastructure and CI/CD pipelines
- Improve reliability through observability and alerting (Prometheus, Grafana, Sentry) and structured logging
- Participate in PR reviews and technical design; communicate trade-offs clearly
- Contribute to React front-end work when features call for it (full-stack capable, not front-end-first)
Requirements — Must Have
- 2–4 years professional experience building and operating production backend services
- Strong JavaScript/TypeScript on Node.js (Express or similar)
- Solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and complexity — you can reason about why a query or job pipeline is slow
- Sound grasp of software design principles (SOLID, separation of concerns) and transactional guarantees (ACID) in real systems
- MongoDB — schema design, indexing, query performance
- Relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, or similar) — solid SQL, schema design, and transactions; you understand when a document store is the wrong tool
- Hands-on AWS experience (any mix of EC2/ECS, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, Secrets Manager)
- Docker — building images and running containerized services in development and production
- Hands-on experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar) as part of a professional workflow
- REST API design, Git, code review, and CI-based workflows
- A genuine testing habit — unit and integration tests ship with every change, not after it; comfortable debugging across services. This is non-negotiable for us.
Nice to Have
- Terraform or other infrastructure-as-code experience
- Kubernetes or container orchestration (ECS, EKS)
- Experience shipping LLM-powered features: RAG, embeddings, vector databases (e.g., Atlas Vector Search), prompt pipelines
- Redis job queues (Bull/BullMQ) and worker architectures
- Observability stacks: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Sentry
- Third-party API integrations at scale (SendGrid, Twilio, Stripe, or similar)
- Application security experience — OWASP fundamentals, authentication/authorization design, least-privilege IAM, secrets management
- Multi-tenant SaaS architecture experience
- React experience for occasional full-stack work
Our Stack
Backend: Node.js 20, Express, MongoDB/Mongoose (Atlas), Redis with BullMQ, REST APIs (OpenAPI), Jest/Mocha
AI: LLM APIs, embeddings and vector search on MongoDB Atlas; Claude Code, Cursor, and Copilot in the development workflow
Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, S3, IAM, Secrets Manager, CloudWatch), Terraform, Docker, CI/CD via GitHub Actions
Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Sentry
Integrations: SendGrid, Twilio, Stripe, Nylas
Front-end (secondary): React 18, Redux, React Query, Tailwind CSS
Experience
Required: Node.js backend development (2 years), MongoDB (2 years), Relational databases / SQL (1 year), AWS (1 year), Docker (1 year), Automated testing (2 years)
Preferred: AI-assisted development tools, Terraform / infrastructure-as-code, Kubernetes
Benefits
Dental care · Extended health care · Life insurance · Paid time off · Stock options · Vision care
Aires · www.aires.ai · Vancouver, BC · Full-time, Permanent
Pay: $80,000.00-$120,000.00 per year
Benefits:
- Dental care
- Extended health care
- Life insurance
- Paid time off
- Stock options
- Vision care
Application question(s):
- Do you have professional experience with AI-assisted development tools (Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, or similar)?
Experience:
- Node.js backend development: 2 years (preferred)
- MongoDB: 2 years (preferred)
- relational database / SQL: 1 year (preferred)
- AWS: 1 year (preferred)
- Docker: 1 year (preferred)
- automated testing (unit/integration): 2 years (preferred)
- Kubernetes: 1 year (preferred)
- Terraform: 1 year (preferred)
Work Location: Hybrid remote in Vancouver, BC
