Platform Architect & Backend Lead - IoT

About the role

Flatgigs is building a multi-tenant, hardware-agnostic IoT platform from the ground up and needs a senior engineer who designs the system architecture in the morning and writes production backend code in the afternoon. It is neither an architecture-only nor a coding-only role, and the candidate will also own cloud infrastructure as interim DevOps until the team scales. The position is remote.

Key responsibilities

• Design the end-to-end IoT platform: device connectivity, MQTT/protocol ingestion, stream processing, time-series storage, REST/GraphQL API and real-time WebSocket delivery
• Define the multi-tenant data model with strict data isolation, tenant-scoped API tokens and row-level security
• Design the device lifecycle system: provisioning, X.509/JWT authentication, device registry, status tracking and decommissioning
• Architect a protocol abstraction layer so MQTT, Modbus, OPC-UA, CoAP and HTTP devices normalise to the same internal model
• Design a configurable rule engine for alerts, automations and integrations, and plan OTA firmware updates with versioning and rollback
• Write Architecture Decision Records for every major technical choice and design the scaling path from 100 to 500,000+ devices
• Build core services from scratch, REST and GraphQL APIs with OpenAPI, WebSocket and SSE endpoints, device command-and-control and a device shadow service
• Write unit, integration and load tests and own service reliability, including SLOs, alerting runbooks and on-call incident response
• Provision AWS environments with Terraform, configure AWS IoT Core, set up GitHub Actions CI/CD, CloudWatch monitoring and IAM, then hand over fully documented infrastructure to a DevOps engineer in Phase 2

Required profile

• 7-12 years of software or systems engineering, with at least 4 years building IoT platform backends or connected product infrastructure
• Expert, hands-on experience with AWS IoT Core or Azure IoT Hub in production
• Non-negotiable expert MQTT knowledge (v3.1 and v5.0) and proficiency in Python and Node.js/TypeScript; Go is a strong advantage
• Experience with a time-series database (InfluxDB, TimescaleDB or AWS Timestream) and Terraform or AWS CloudFormation
• Experience with multi-tenant SaaS backends, security fundamentals (TLS/mTLS, OAuth 2.0, JWT, secrets management) and message brokers or streaming (Kafka, RabbitMQ, Kinesis)
• Proven ability to work autonomously at a senior level, document decisions and flag risks

Nice to have

• Industrial protocols such as Modbus, OPC-UA and BACnet
• Broker deployment (EMQX, HiveMQ, VerneMQ) and edge runtimes (AWS Greengrass, Azure IoT Edge, Balena)
• Digital twins, container orchestration (Kubernetes, ECS) and open-source IoT contributions