Backend Engineer – IoT Platform (Remote, Cape Town)

About the role

PowerOptimal is looking for a Backend Engineer to own and evolve the backend platform that powers its Elon® Smart solar PV water heater. The role is remote‑first, based in the Greater Cape Town area with monthly in‑person alignment, and involves both backend and occasional front‑end work.

Key responsibilities

• Design, develop and maintain a scalable, secure backend platform on AWS for IoT device connectivity and telemetry.
• Manage the device telemetry ingestion pipeline using AWS IoT Core, MQTT, Kafka (MSK) and serverless Lambda processing.
• Maintain the time‑series database (Timescale/Postgres) and portal database, ensuring performance as the device fleet grows.
• Develop and secure public‑facing APIs (API Gateway, CloudFront) and authentication flows (Cognito).
• Support notification infrastructure and platform observability with tools such as Grafana.
• Apply security best practices, including IAM least‑privilege, TLS encryption, and encryption at rest.
• Contribute occasional front‑end work for internal tools or customer‑facing features.

Required profile

• 4+ years of professional software engineering experience with a strong focus on backend development.
• Proven experience building and owning IoT or smart‑device platforms.
• Hands‑on expertise with AWS services (IoT Core, Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudFront).
• Experience with event‑driven architectures, MQTT and Kafka.
• Solid understanding of CI/CD and infrastructure‑as‑code tools (CloudFormation or Terraform).

Required skills

• AWS (IoT Core, Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudFront)
• MQTT
• Kafka / MSK
• Serverless processing (AWS Lambda)
• TimescaleDB / PostgreSQL
• gRPC
• Protobuf
• Grafana
• IAM, TLS, encryption at rest
• CI/CD pipelines
• Infrastructure as code (CloudFormation, Terraform)