Backend Developer
RemoteFull-time
TeklTalk answers a visitor's question from a site's own content. The backend is what makes that true: crawl a site, extract what's readable, embed it, and retrieve the right few paragraphs in under a second. That's the work.
About the role
We're a small team, which means the person who writes a query is the person who indexes for it, watches it in production, and gets paged when it regresses. There is no separate ops rotation to hand things to.
The stack is TypeScript end to end: a Next.js App Router app on Vercel, Postgres with pgvector for retrieval, Prisma for schema and migrations, and background workers that do the crawling and embedding out of band.
You'd be working on the half of the product customers never see directly and notice immediately when it's wrong — a stale page, a slow answer, a bot that says it doesn't know something the site clearly says.
What you'll do
- Extend the crawl and extraction pipeline: sitemap discovery, fetching, readable-content extraction, and deciding what's worth indexing.
- Work on retrieval quality — chunking, embeddings, vector search and the ranking that decides which passages reach the model.
- Build and harden the job queue that runs it all: retries, backoff, partial failure, and making a re-crawl cheap enough to run often.
- Write the schema changes and migrations that go with your work, and keep the query paths fast as tables grow.
- Own what you ship in production: instrument it, read the logs, and fix it when the graphs say something changed.
What we're looking for
- Solid TypeScript on the server, and comfort in a codebase you didn't write.
- Real SQL — you can read a query plan, add the right index, and explain why a query got slow.
- Experience with background/queued work and the failure modes that come with it: duplicate delivery, poison jobs, jobs that die halfway.
- You write for the next reader. This codebase explains its non-obvious decisions in comments, and we'd want yours to as well.
- Enough product sense to push back when a ticket asks for the wrong thing.
Nice to have
- Worked with embeddings, vector databases or retrieval-augmented generation before.
- Postgres beyond the basics — extensions, partial indexes, advisory locks.
- Next.js App Router, server components and server actions.
- Experience running things on Vercel, or on any serverless platform where cold starts and timeouts are your problem.
Apply
Name, email, and your résumé as a PDF. No cover letter — if there's something you want us to know, put it at the top of the résumé.