Freelance Senior Backend Engineer in Berlin

• Babbel Labs is rebuilding how learning content is created, stored and served, and how we decide what a learner sees next. The architecture for that is being set now, by a small number of engineers, and this role is one of them
• You will build and run the services behind it, in a serverless-first TypeScript and Node stack on AWS, owning them from the contract at their edge to their behaviour under load
• This is a senior individual-contributor role. You will design, build, ship and operate, and the seniority shows in the decisions you own rather than in a team reporting to you
• Build and evolve services across our learning platform, owning each one from its API contract through to what runs in production
• Take on services you did not write, alongside the people who did
• Design API and data contracts that hold up over time, with type-safe transforms between the API, the domain and persistence
• Run what you build. Instrument it, know how it fails, change live data safely, and be the person who works out why it broke
• Deliver with coding agents as a matter of course, and verify what they produce before you rely on it

Benefits

• 30 vacation days and flexible working hours
• BVG card or Swapfiets bike
• Jobbatical and Sabbatical options
• Many internal & external learning opportunities to choose from
• A yearly Learning & Development budget
• Visa and relocation assistance
• Full access to Babbel & Babbel Live classes
• Modern office in the heart of buzzing Berlin equipped with a family, music, faith and nap room
• Various internal communities to be part of including the Femgineers, DEI Ambassadors, Accessibility & Disability Group and more

Python as a welcome secondary language. Some of our services are Python, and a Labs engineer can expect to touch themStrong, hands-on backend engineering in TypeScript and Node as your primary working language today. We mean back-end services: not build tooling, and not the server a front-end framework happens to ship withSelf-sufficiency. You get yourself unstuck in an unfamiliar codebase without a minder, and you work within its grain rather than rewriting what you have not yet understoodReal production ownership. You have instrumented your own services, understood their failure modes, changed live data without losing any, and worked incidents on systems you ownedDeep, practical AWS experience in a serverless-first setting. Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB and event streaming are our daily tools, and we want someone who has designed against them rather than only deployed onto themWorking familiarity with infrastructure as code (Terraform) and CI/CD pipelines, enough to ship and change your own service’s delivery. This is not an infrastructure role, so depth here is not the barCoding agents are part of your daily workflow, and you check their output before you rely on it. You are neither dismissive of them nor careless with themThe ability to design API and data contracts and to model a domain, including type-safe transforms at the boundaries between the API, the domain and persistenceWe are a learning company, inside and out, and we encourage you to apply even if you do not fit all the technical requirements - all candidates are assessed based on skills, qualifications and on our business needsGo or Rust for performance-critical components. Fully optionalPublic technical work, such as open-source contributions or writingExperience with a monorepo build system and shared tooling

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