Backend Engineer
- Dubai, United Arab Emirates
Posted 2 days ago
About the role
About AlgoDriven
AlgoDriven builds SaaS for the automotive industry across Australia, the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Europe. EvalExpert for trade-in appraisals, DriveExpert for test-drive management, and our pricing and VIN-decode APIs process large volumes of data daily for dealerships and OEM partners.
We're growing our Dubai engineering team.
How we build
We are an AI-first engineering team, and we mean something specific by it. Our engineers drive coding agents wired into the terminal, the repo, the test suite and the deploy pipeline, and take features from a written spec to production with the agent doing most of the typing. Your job is to decide what to build, write a brief precise enough to act on, review hard, and own the result.
Editor autocomplete is not what we mean. If your AI use stops at Copilot suggesting the next line, this role won't fit. If you've written specs an agent built from, hooked agents up to your own CLI tools or MCP servers, had them run tests and touch infrastructure, and you know where they fail — you'll fit well.
What you'll do
Own backend features end to end: spec, build, deploy, monitor, iterate
Drive AI coding agents across that whole path, and improve the agent tooling the team relies on
Debug production issues — performance bottlenecks, data problems
Work deeply with MySQL: query optimisation, indexing, large tables, migrations
Build and scale services on AWS
Contribute to architecture decisions and mentor as the team grows
Essential
5+ years building production backend systems in PHP and Node.js — real depth in both, not familiarity with one
You ship with AI agents, not just autocomplete. You've connected a coding agent to your terminal and repo, worked spec-first, and put the result into production — Claude Code, Cursor's agent, Codex, MCP servers, agents in CI. Real work, not a weekend experiment
Strong MySQL, including performance tuning
Proven ability to debug and improve live systems
Already in the UAE — we sponsor the visa, but we don't relocate candidates from abroad
Nice to have
Custom agent tooling: MCP servers, CLI integrations, agent-driven CI
AWS in production, Docker, React
Queues, background jobs, event-driven systems
SaaS, multi-tenant or high-traffic experience
What we offer
Competitive salary based on experience
Long-term product work, not agency projects
A team that expects you to use the best tools available, and pays for them
Real scale, real data, real users, and a growing Dubai hub with progression
Our process
Applying takes five minutes. If your answers fit, you'll get a short AI interview — about 35 minutes, whenever suits you — covering how you own work, how you debug production, and how you actually use AI agents. Clear that and there's a technical assessment of roughly 65 minutes: PHP or JavaScript, Node.js, MySQL, and a written brief of the kind you'd hand to a coding agent. Only then does a human get involved, and by then we already know your background fits, so the conversation is about the work.
Every completed application gets an answer. No CV black holes.