Senior Backend Engineer

Join a team revolutionizing mental healthcare.

At Mentalyc, we are redefining the future of mental health care by merging the power of AI with clinical expertise. Our vision is to make therapy more effective, efficient, and truly measurable through insightful, data-driven interventions. Our mission is to build an AI-based platform that fully automates note-taking in therapy, creating an anonymized data set to help uncover the most effective therapeutic methods.

We believe in elevating mental health care, one note at a time. As a team, we are driven by curiosity, care, and collaboration. We push boundaries, embrace new ideas, and trust in each other and the process. We strive to inspire, innovate, and explore, all while ensuring data privacy and supporting therapists so they can focus on what matters most—delivering quality care.

Our values guide everything we do:

• Curiosity drives us to explore new possibilities, innovate, and continuously improve. Whether it's developing our AI tools or growing personally, we embrace learning at every level.
• Care extends beyond our mission to improve therapy. We care deeply for our team, clients, and partners, ensuring we create an environment of support, respect, and well-being.
• Trust forms the foundation of our relationships. We maintain data security, uphold transparency, and foster trust internally within our team and externally with clients and partners.
• Collaboration is at the heart of our success. We work together across departments and with therapists to create solutions that truly make a difference in mental health care.

If you share our passion for making a positive impact on mental healthcare and are excited to be part of a groundbreaking team, we invite you to join us at Mentalyc.

What We Offer:

• End-to-End Backend Ownership: Design and implement scalable, distributed backend and database solutions, improving performance and efficiency across development, staging, and production environments.
• Cutting-Edge Scalability Challenges: Work on high-throughput backend systems and optimize our database system to achieve near-instant transactions.
• Cloud-Native Engineering: Build and optimize backend infrastructure using AWS cloud services, ensuring robust and resilient deployments.
• Flexible Remote Work: Join a globally distributed team with a collaborative and high-impact engineering culture.

Responsibilities:

• Optimize Database Performance: Architect and scale our MySQL/PostgreSQL database to handle high-frequency transactions with minimal latency.
• Implement Low-Latency Solutions: Design and deploy distributed database strategies to ensure high availability and low-latency API and query performance across multiple regions.
• Enhance Database Versioning & Management: Implement best practices for database migrations, versioning, and schema management across development, staging, and production.
• Improve API & Backend Services: Build and maintain high-performance GraphQL and REST APIs, ensuring seamless data flow and system integrity.
• Automate & Scale Infrastructure: Work with DevOps and other engineers to streamline deployments, automate scaling, and improve system observability on AWS (EKS, RDS, Lambda, DynamoDB, etc.) and other stacks.
• Drive Testing & Reliability: Develop and implement database testing frameworks to ensure performance and data integrity under load.
• Enhance Reliability & Debugging: Ability to troubleshoot performance bottlenecks, database slow queries, and API latency issues.

Requirements:

Core Backend & API Development:

• Backend Scalability Experience: 5+ years of experience in backend engineering, focusing on handling high-traffic APIs and database scalability.
• Proficient in Node.js & TypeScript: Strong experience building and optimizing scalable APIs.
• Test-Driven Development (TDD): Comfortable writing unit, integration, and database tests using tools like Jest, Mocha, Supertest, or dbUnit.

Database & Performance Optimization

• SQL & Database Optimization: Expertise with MySQL, including query tuning, indexing, and replication for performance.
• Database Migrations & Schema Management: Familiarity with Prisma Migrate, Flyway, or Liquibase to handle schema evolution across environments.
• Caching & Performance Optimization: Knowledge of Redis, Memcachedand strategies to reduce database load.

Infrastructure & Cloud (Linux, AWS)

• Linux & Automation Proficiency: Comfortable working in Linux-based environments, with basic scripting (Bash, Python) and automation tools (Docker, Terraform).
• AWS Cloud Services: Hands-on experience with AWS (RDS, DynamoDB, Lambda, S3, API Gateway, ECS or EKS) for scalable infrastructure.
• CI/CD & Deployment: Familiarity with automated deployments and managing staging/production environments.

Observability & Security:

• Monitoring & Logging: Experience setting up Grafana, Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Loki, or ELK Stack for log analysis and distributed tracing.
• Code Quality & Security: Experience with static analysis tools like SonarQube, secure API design, and authentication/authorization best practices (OAuth, JWT, etc.).

Personal Qualities:

• Proactive & Independent Problem-Solver: Able to work autonomously in a fast-moving, high-growth startup environment.
• Strong Communication Skills: Ability to effectively articulate technical concepts and collaborate across diverse teams.
• High Adaptability: Comfortable working in a fast-paced and evolving environment and can pivot quickly to address changing priorities.
• Results-Driven: Focused on achieving measurable outcomes and continuously seeking to improve both team performance and product quality.
• Strategic Thinker: Able to align technical decisions with broader business goals and has a knack for seeing the bigger picture.

Nice to Have:

• Background in High-Frequency Transactional Systems: Previous work in fintech, e-commerce, gaming, or real-time analytics .
• Experience with Compliance & Security Standards: Familiarity with HIPAA, SOC 2, or similar compliance frameworks for data security and privacy.
• Serverless & Event-Driven Architectures: Knowledge of AWS Lambda, NS/SQS, and event-driven patterns.

Why Join Us?

• Own and lead mission-critical backend projects that impact the performance and scalability of our entire platform.
• Solve real-world scaling challenges in a high-throughput, high-growth tech environment.
• Be part of a collaborative and innovative engineering team that values creativity, autonomy, and cutting-edge technology.
• Competitive salary and flexible remote work policy.