Backend Engineer application

01

Identity and profile

Provide LinkedIn or a PDF CV. Public code and everything else below are optional.

Full nameEmailCurrent cityCountryCurrent timezoneOptional; useful later for schedulingPhone or WhatsApp

LinkedIn profileRequired only if you do not upload a CV

CV (PDF only)

Upload a PDF, or provide LinkedIn above.

GitHubGitLabPortfolioTechnical blog or write-up

Other public work

02

Logistics

These facts are visible to the human reviewer; mismatches are not silently discarded.

Current notice periodEarliest realistic start date

The budget is USD 2,000–2,500/month. Does this work for you?Can you provide at least four hours of daily overlap with Berlin?

03

Technical experience

Separate what you personally did from what the wider team did.

Choose one backend or data system you worked on in production. What did it do, what was the scale, what did you personally own, what failed, and what changed?Maximum 180 wordsDescribe one schema change or data migration you ran against live customer data. What could have gone wrong, how did you roll it out, and how did you verify it?Maximum 150 words I have not personally run this kind of migration.An external advertising API may return overlapping rows and later changes. What would you need to know before designing ingestion and deduplication? State your assumptions.Maximum 150 words

04

AI verification and context

We care about judgment and verification—not tool enthusiasm.

This is initial evidence, not a hard-skills verdict.Shortlisted candidates validate technical depth in a live screen and a structured paired exercise.

Give one concrete example where an AI coding tool produced incorrect, unsafe, or misleading output. What was wrong, how did you notice it, and what did you do?Maximum 120 wordsAnything else relevant to ingestion pipelines, analytical databases, distributed jobs, or production reliability?Maximum 100 words