Remote-First Backend Engineer - AWS IoT Telemetry Platform

PowerOptimal; Wes-Kaap; Hybrid; ZAR 600,000 - 900,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote-first culture

Monthly in-person alignment

Job summary

PowerOptimal seeks a Backend Engineer to own and scale our IoT backend platform on AWS. You will work primarily on backend and platform development with occasional frontend tasks.

The role is remote-first, based in the Greater Cape Town area with monthly in‑person alignment. Responsibilities include building APIs, modernizing the telemetry pipeline from AWS IoT Core through Kafka to storage, and evolving our Timescale/Postgres databases while maintaining secure, observable services across the

Qualifications

• 4+ years in software/backend engineering with cloud focus.
• Experience owning IoT or device‑driven platforms is essential.
• Strong AWS hands-on with IoT Core, Lambda, API Gateway, Cognito, CloudFront.
• Familiarity with MQTT, Kafka or similar streaming platforms.

Responsibilities

• Own and grow the backend platform for IoT devices on AWS.
• Design scalable, secure database architectures and APIs.
• Develop serverless processing (AWS Lambda) for telemetry.
• Maintain hot and cold storage pipelines and Timescale/Postgres.
• Ensure secure API access via API Gateway and Cognito.
• Contribute to front-end work when needed for internal tools.
• Implement automated CI/CD and IaC for cloud infra.
• Promote observability with Grafana and robust security practices.

Skills

Backend development

AWS

IoT platforms

MQTT

CI/CD

gRPC

Rust exposure

Security mindset

Agile

Team leadership

Education

BEng/BSc EE/CS

Tools

Terraform

CloudFormation

Job description

PowerOptimal seeks a Backend Engineer to own and scale our IoT backend platform on AWS. You will work primarily on backend and platform development with occasional frontend tasks.

The role is remote-first, based in the Greater Cape Town area with monthly in‑person alignment. Responsibilities include building APIs, modernizing the telemetry pipeline from AWS IoT Core through Kafka to storage, and evolving our Timescale/Postgres databases while maintaining secure, observable services across the