2x Senior Software Engineer, Node.js (Serverless & Containers) Action Center Analyst

Preference shown to Phoenix, Philadelphia or Northern Virginia but Remote

Bring the cape. The people we help need us every day.

Somewhere right now, a missing child is closer to home than anyone realizes. Somewhere else, a person wanted on a violent felony warrant just walked into a venue full of families. Whether anyone finds out in time depends on people. And those people depend on software that works at 3 a.m. on a holiday weekend, when nobody is staring at the dashboards.

That's where you come in.

WHO WE ARE

Safience builds identity intelligence for public safety. We help identify two kinds of people: those who pose a real threat, and those who need to be found. Every record we work from is sourced from law enforcement. We don't scrape the internet. We don't follow people. There is no video. Not recorded, not streamed, not ever. If law enforcement isn't already looking for you, you pass through and leave no trace.

No alert goes out because a machine said so. Trained analysts in our Rapid Action Center review every identification before anyone gets a call. Every good hero has a code. That's ours.

WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS

Our analysts are the heroes at the end of the line. You build the line. The services you ship carry an image from the field to a human reviewer, and a confirmed alert from that reviewer to the people who can act on it. If a handler drops a message, someone doesn't get found. If a service holds onto data it shouldn't, someone's privacy pays the price. We need both done right, every single time.

You'll report to our Director of Product Architecture and help set the technical direction for everything we run on serverless and containers.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Design, build, and run production Node.js services in TypeScript on AWS Lambda and ECS/Fargate. You own them end to end: code, infrastructure, pipelines, monitoring, and production support.
• Build event-driven systems with API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, and DynamoDB and Kinesis streams.
• Write handlers that are idempotent and retry-safe, with a real dead-letter strategy and partial batch failure reporting. Faster than a speeding bullet is nice. Right every time is the job.
• Tune Lambda for speed and cost: cold starts, bundle size, memory, timeouts, and concurrency.
• Own infrastructure-as-code in Terraform (CDK or SAM where they fit), modular, with remote state and peer-reviewed changes.
• Ship lean, hardened Docker images: multi-stage builds, pinned base images, non-root users, deterministic installs, managed in ECR with scanning and retention policies.
• Run GitHub Actions pipelines with OIDC federation to AWS (no long-lived keys), weighted traffic shifting, blue/green deploys, and automatic rollback on alarm.
• Keep the supply chain clean with lockfiles, private registries, and automated vulnerability and license scanning.
• Instrument everything: structured logs, metrics, and distributed tracing (CloudWatch, X-Ray, OpenTelemetry, Powertools for AWS Lambda). Define SLOs and alarms, take your turn on call, and lead blameless postmortems.
• Keep secrets secret with Secrets Manager, SSM Parameter Store, and KMS. Lock down VPC networking for Lambda and Fargate. Join threat modeling and security reviews, and close what they find.
• Work across multiple AWS accounts with least-privilege, cross-account IAM.
• Lead design for new services and write the doc that explains the trade-offs (Lambda or Fargate, sync or async). Review code with care and mentor the engineers coming up behind you.
• Keep runbooks, architecture diagrams, and onboarding docs current.
• Watch the AWS bill for what you own, and make it smaller.

WHO YOU ARE

• You own a cape. You've leapt a tall monolith in a single bound and lived to write the postmortem. You also know the real superpower in production isn't speed. It's discipline.
• Ownership is your default. Production health, cost, and security are your job, not someone else's ticket.
• You pick the simplest architecture that gets it done, and you can explain why to engineers and non-engineers alike.
• Your code reviews have x-ray vision. You catch the race condition before it ships.
• You write clear design docs, PR descriptions, and incident reports. Every good origin story has a paper trail.
• You make the people around you better through review, pairing, and documentation.
• You take privacy as seriously as uptime. Data you shouldn't keep, you don't keep.

WHAT YOU BRING

• 6+ years of professional software development, including 4+ years building and running production Node.js services
• 3+ years running production workloads on AWS Lambda and containers (ECS/Fargate, EKS, or equivalent)
• A track record of owning services from design through launch through on-call
• Deep Node.js and TypeScript: the event loop, async patterns, streams, memory behavior, CommonJS and ESM, and strong typing habits
• Lambda internals: handler lifecycle, execution environment reuse, concurrency, event source mappings, layers, container-image functions, and runtime upgrades
• Core AWS: IAM, API Gateway, SQS, SNS, EventBridge, Step Functions, DynamoDB, S3, CloudWatch, ECR, ECS/Fargate, and VPC fundamentals
• AWS SDK for JavaScript v3: modular clients, middleware, pagination, and retry configuration
• Docker: multi-stage builds, layer caching, image hardening, and debugging containers locally and in production
• Terraform in production (state, modules, per-environment layouts), plus familiarity with CDK or SAM
• CI/CD in GitHub Actions or similar, including environment promotion and automated test gates
• Testing: unit, integration, and contract tests (Jest, Vitest, or similar), plus local Lambda emulation (SAM CLI, LocalStack, or equivalent)
• Working proficiency with at least one NoSQL store (DynamoDB, MongoDB/DocumentDB) and one relational database

EXTRA POWERS (NICE TO HAVE)

• AWS certifications: Developer Associate, Solutions Architect Associate or Professional, or DevOps Engineer Professional
• AWS Organizations and multi-account landing zone patterns
• Identity-aware proxies or zero-trust access for internal services
• OpenTelemetry across Lambda and container workloads
• Container supply-chain tooling: SBOM generation, image signing, Trivy, Grype, or Amazon Inspector
• Moving workloads between Lambda and containers, or off legacy hosts onto serverless
• Regulated or security-sensitive environments (SOC 2, PCI, gaming compliance)
• Go, Python, Java, or Scala
• Prior experience saving the world is a plus but not required

YOUR FIRST SIX MONTHS

• 30 days: Your access is set up, you've shipped your first production change through the full pipeline, and you've written up the gaps you found in our existing Lambda and container services.
• 90 days: You own at least one service end to end, on-call included, and you've made it measurably better on observability, deployment safety, or cost.
• 6 months: You've led the design and delivery of a new service or a major refactor, and you've set a team standard others build on, like a Lambda project template, a base Docker image, or a Terraform module.

WHAT WE OFFER

• Fully remote. If you're near Phoenix, Philadelphia, or Northern Virginia, that's a plus, but the best candidate wins, wherever they log in from.
• Work that matters in the most literal sense. When the system holds up, a child goes home.
• A team that treats privacy as an engineering requirement, not a legal afterthought
• Cape: optional. On-call: shared fairly.

REQUIREMENTS

• Ability to pass a comprehensive background check, plus continuous vetting for as long as you're on the team. Secret identities are fine. Secret pasts are not.
• Participation in an on-call rotation. Villains don't keep business hours, and neither do outages.
• Authorization to work in the United States. We do not offer visa sponsorship.

TO APPLY

Send your resume. If you have public repos, design write-ups, or talks you're proud of, send those too. We read them.

The people we help can't wait for a ticket to work its way out of the backlog. If you build things that hold up when it counts, suit up and apply.

Safience is an equal opportunity employer.