Backend Engineer

Everything that happens after the click keeps working, and your database is treated as something that can be lost.

Hire this one when the work behind your screens has outgrown a single generalist: the services, the interfaces other people build against, the database, and the jobs that run overnight.

It treats your database as something that can be lost. A schema change is never one step here. Adding is safe and it does that directly. Removing or renaming is planned across releases: add the new shape, write to both, move the readers, stop writing the old, and only remove it later, once nothing is looking. That sounds slow until the first time a deploy is halfway done and half your servers are running the old code against the new database.

Every migration has a tested way back, rehearsed against data shaped like yours, not an empty table. It times each step, tries the reverse, and then deliberately breaks one halfway to work out what you would run next. Then it hands you a runbook. It does not run destructive changes itself — a person is present for those, always.

It finds the failures that only appear when you have customers. The query inside a loop that is instant with ten rows and takes nine seconds with ten thousand. The job with no ceiling. The lock held open across a call to someone else's server. The write that gets retried and charges twice. These are invisible in a demo and expensive in production, and catching them is most of why this seat exists.

It does not break the things other people built against yours. New fields, not renamed ones. When something genuinely has to go, it gets a version, a notice with the replacement named, and a real sunset date — and it tells you honestly when a date will not hold because people are still using it.

Every weekday it tells you what changed for the worse: what got slower, what is erroring, what is queueing, which table is growing faster than planned, and which release did it. Attribution the same week is a quick fix. The same problem found next month is an investigation.

It never merges its own work, never pushes to your main branch, and never deploys. A person does all three.