Senior Back-End Engineer

About the job

We're looking for an incredible back-end software engineer who can help us to design and build our world-class product for modern charities. At Beacon we’re a growing technology startup building the best nonprofit-focused CRM in the world. We passionately believe in the power of technology to make a difference.

Chris and David, both software engineers, founded Beacon in 2017 to build a new kind of charity CRM using the latest technology and design principles.

Now hundreds of innovative charities around the world trust Beacon to run their core technology infrastructure. Animal welfare, human rights, disaster relief, cancer support - all powered by Beacon. You can see a quick demo of our product, here.

We have doing good at the core of our mission, but we're also profitable, privately owned, and our goals are for long term sustainable growth - not making a quick buck for venture capitalists.

At Beacon we take building exceptional software very seriously. In a recent survey by Fundraising magazine we were rated 4.9/5 on functionality and 5/5 on ease of use - we want to keep it that way!

Our technology stack is built around JavaScript running on AWS. The front-end web app is built with React, making extensive use of Material UI. Beacon's back-end infrastructure is in Node.js, based around microservices running on AWS Lambda. All new endpoints are written using GraphQL, and we're big advocates. Our database infrastructure is a combination of Postgres and Google BigQuery, and we’re continually refining and optimising our databases for scalability and performance.

Responsibilities

You will be driving the development of the back-end of the Beacon product, with a focus on the database infrastructure that powers everything. You'll work directly with the founders and our existing engineering team to design, develop, and maintain a sophisticated and modern web application’s infrastructure.

You will:

• Design and implement improvements to the core of the Beacon product
• Write clean, maintainable code to deliver on the Beacon product roadmap
• Focus on the development and scaling of Beacon’s database infrastructure, using Amazon RDS and Aurora, and Google BigQuery
• Drive the innovation and scalability of Beacon’s whole cloud-based infrastructure, including queues, caches, and system monitoring and alerting tools
• Work closely with other engineers to come up with creative and innovative solutions to challenging technical problems

Requirements

You’ll have at least 8 years of relevant experience with - and a passion for - using JavaScript to build the infrastructure that supports beautiful desktop web applications. You'll love trying out new ways of doing things.

You'll need at least 5 years of direct practical experience with the following technologies:

• Node.js
• AWS Lambda
• Amazon RDS
• Google BigQuery

And there are bonus points for these:

• TypeScript
• GraphQL
• Amazon Aurora
• Postgres
• SQS (or other queueing architecture. We love queues!)

Copyright © ReadingWaters 2025.