Backend Engineer (Python/Go/Node.js)

Strong backend fundamentals, applied across the languages the problem calls for.

Design and operate the services behind search, bookings, payments, and integrations — choosing the right tool for each problem rather than the one you already know.

About Sastaticket.pk

Sastaticket.pk is Pakistan’s leading technology-driven travel platforms, helping millions of travellers plan and book journeys with greater ease, confidence, and choice. We are building a profitable, ambitious, engineering-led company that solves meaningful problems across travel, payments, pricing, customer experience, automation, and marketplace reliability.
We believe great businesses are built by great people. We give talented individuals meaningful ownership, exposure to important decisions, and the opportunity to grow through real responsibility and measurable impact.

Why This Role Exists

Our platform is deliberately not built in a single language. We work across Python, Go, and Node.js, and choose between them based on what a given problem actually needs. The things that matter most — event streaming, caching, data modelling, resilience against unreliable third parties — look the same regardless of which one we are writing in.
This role exists because we want engineers hired for backend judgment rather than framework familiarity. We need people who can reason about correctness, concurrency, failure, and data before they reason about syntax, and who can move to where the problem is instead of waiting for work that matches their stack.

About the Opportunity

As a Backend Engineer, you will own backend services end to end — from design and data modelling through implementation, testing, deployment, and production operation. You will work primarily in Python/Django, Go, Rust or Node.js depending on the service, with PostgreSQL, Redis, Apache Pulsar, Docker, and Kubernetes as the common ground beneath them.
You will not be boxed into one repository or one language. You will be expected to develop depth in at least one of our stacks and working competence in a second, and to bring the same standard of engineering to both.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and operate backend services and APIs that are correct under real production load, not just under happy-path testing.
• Model data deliberately — schema design, indexing, query performance, and migration safety in PostgreSQL.
• Build event-driven and asynchronous flows using Apache Pulsar, message queues, and background workers, reasoning explicitly about ordering, retries, idempotency, and partial failure.
• Integrate third-party systems — airline and supplier APIs, payment gateways, partner platforms — and make them behave predictably despite latency, downtime, and inconsistent contracts.
• Apply caching, connection management, and concurrency patterns appropriately, and understand the trade-offs you are making when you do.
• Containerize and ship services with Docker and Kubernetes, and take responsibility for them once they are running.
• Instrument what you build with meaningful logging, metrics, and tracing so that failures are detectable before customers report them.
• Write tests that establish confidence, review peers’ code with substance, and keep technical documentation current.
• Contribute to architectural discussions and make pragmatic technology choices — including choosing the right language for a new service.
• Partner with Product to understand requirements, surface trade-offs early, and connect technical decisions to business impact.
• Mentor other engineers, share knowledge across stacks, and reduce technical debt rather than routing around it.

What Success Looks Like

• Services you own are reliable, observable, well tested, and understood by more people than just you.
• Data models and queries hold up as volume grows, and migrations land without incident.
• Asynchronous and event-driven flows behave correctly under retry, duplication, and partial failure — not only when everything works.
• Third-party integrations degrade gracefully instead of taking customer-facing flows down with them.
• You contribute effectively in more than one language and are not blocked by unfamiliar codebases.
• Technical debt and quality risks are raised early with a proposed path, not discovered late.
• The engineers around you make better decisions because of how you review, document, and explain your work.

What You’ll Learn

• How a high-volume travel platform is architected across services, languages, and teams.
• Production practice in Python/Django, Go, Rust and Node.js — and where each genuinely earns its place.
• Event-driven and distributed system design using Apache Pulsar, Redis, and PostgreSQL.
• Operating services on Kubernetes and AWS, with real observability and incident practice.
• Building resilient integrations against external systems you do not control.
• Commercial and customer thinking applied to technical decision-making.

Career Growth

Strong performance can lead to broader ownership across backend verticals, system design and architecture, platform and distributed-systems work, and senior engineering responsibility. Because this role is deliberately not tied to a single stack, growth here tends to widen the range of problems you are trusted with rather than narrowing it. Progression is based on capability, judgment, ownership, and measurable engineering impact.

What We’re Looking For

• BS in Computer Science or a similar degree.
• 3+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Genuine depth in at least one of Python (Django/DRF), Go, or Node.js — and the ability and willingness to become productive in another.
• Solid computer science fundamentals: data structures, concurrency, algorithmic reasoning, and an understanding of what your code costs at runtime.
• Strong relational database skills, particularly PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimization, transactions, and safe migrations.
• Practical experience designing and building REST APIs that other teams and services consume.
• Working knowledge of asynchronous processing, message queues, or event streaming such as Apache Pulsar or Kafka.
• Experience with caching layers such as Redis, and sound judgment about when caching helps and when it hides problems.
• Hands-on experience with Docker and version control workflows using Git.
• A disciplined approach to testing, code review, documentation, and production quality.
• Demonstrated problem-solving ability, clear communication, and a proactive ownership mindset.
• Experience with Kubernetes, AWS, CI/CD pipelines, observability tooling, or third-party API and payment integrations will be considered an advantage.

What Will Help You Thrive

The people who succeed at Sastaticket are those who:

• Build trust by being accurate, transparent, dependable, and honest about risks, assumptions, and mistakes.
• Take extreme ownership by following through on commitments, closing loops, escalating issues early, and taking responsibility for outcomes.
• Stay customer-focused by understanding how technical decisions influence customer trust, experience, and long-term business success.
• Demonstrate curiosity by seeking to understand the business and customer context behind technical work and asking thoughtful questions.
• Learn continuously by embracing feedback, developing new skills, and improving their judgment over time.
• Deliver with speed and quality by producing timely, reliable, and maintainable work.
• Leverage AI and modern tools to improve productivity, automate repetitive work, and enhance quality.
• Collaborate effectively by communicating clearly, building strong relationships, and making the people around them more successful.

What We Offer

• Market-competitive salary.
• Medical coverage for self and dependents.
• Gratuity.
• Annual travel allowance.
• Continuous learning and professional development opportunities.
• Exposure to senior leadership and important business decisions.
• Meaningful ownership and career growth based on performance and impact.
• A collaborative, ambitious, and high-performance work environment.

Location: Karachi, Pakistan · Full-time · On-site

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Ready to build your career through meaningful impact?

If you care more about building systems that hold up than about the language they are written in, we’d love to hear from you.

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