Backend Engineer

About Virtido

Virtido is an entrepreneurial and innovative IT company headquartered in Zurich, Switzerland. We realize ideas and projects – from strategic concept to technical implementation – closely alongside our dynamic clients, with a strong focus on start-up and fast-growing companies. Since inception in 2015, we have grown rapidly to currently 140+ professionals across Switzerland, Poland, Ukraine, and the Philippines.

About the Client

Our Client is the first virtual assistant specifically designed for psychotherapy. Our AI-powered practice management software automatically generates session notes and psychological reports, giving therapists more time to focus on their patients.

We are the market leading AI assistant for psychotherapists. Over 2,000 psychotherapists across the DACH region use our platform every day, and we process hundreds of thousands of sessions per month. We are ISO 27001:2022 certified and hold a BSI C5 attestation.

We are a multidisciplinary team of 12 in Berlin-Mitte. Being the market leader in documentation is our starting position, not our goal. We are going much deeper, into the therapeutic process itself and into how a practice is run, with new products, some of which will be regulated as medical devices under EU MDR.

About this Role

Our roadmap is limited by engineering throughput, not by ideas. You will be our fourth engineer, with a focus on backend systems and architecture. You will shape how our services fit together, how data moves through them, and how they support a growing product reliably and efficiently.

Working closely with the CTO and the engineering team, you will turn product needs into practical technical decisions and production code. Your work will span APIs, databases, background processing, real-time capabilities, and the systems around our AI services. You should understand how these systems run in the cloud and how hosting choices affect performance, reliability, security, and cost.

We are a small team. Your strongest expertise will be in the backend, and you will be comfortable contributing across the stack when a feature needs it. You will take work from an ambiguous problem through implementation, release, and the improvements that follow.

Responsibilities

• Shape the architecture. Design service boundaries, APIs, and communication between our product backend and AI services. Make pragmatic decisions about what to extend, simplify, or redesign, balancing delivery speed with maintainability and future needs.
• Build backend features. Implement the business logic, APIs, background jobs, and integrations that power new product capabilities. Own your work through release and production use.
• Design dependable data systems. Develop relational data models, improve database and query performance, and plan safe migrations. Build for data integrity, clear access boundaries, and changing product requirements.
• Build reliable AI workflows. Work with our AI services to support transcription and report generation. Handle long-running processing, retries, partial failures, and changing demand around probabilistic output.
• Build real-time capabilities. Develop WebSocket-based features and processing flows where latency and connection reliability are visible to the user.
• Improve production reliability. Use monitoring, logs, and traces to understand system behaviour, investigate incidents, and address bottlenecks in performance, reliability, and cost.
• Help the team ship well. Work closely with other engineers on technical design and implementation. Keep delivery cycles short, with design controls and traceable test evidence on the surfaces that fall under EU MDR.

Requirements

• Strong backend engineering. You have designed, built, and operated production services. You understand API design, business logic, asynchronous processing, and integrations, and you write clear, maintainable code. Our backend stack includes TypeScript/NestJS and Python/FastAPI.
• Practical architectural judgment. You can turn an unclear product requirement into a system design and carry it through implementation. You can explain the tradeoffs behind decisions you have made, including when a simpler design was the better choice.
• Cloud and distributed systems understanding. You have worked with backend services running in a cloud environment and understand how compute, networking, storage, and managed services fit together. You can reason about scaling, timeouts, concurrency, failure handling, and the performance and cost implications of hosting choices.
• Relational database depth. You are comfortable with SQL, data modelling, indexes, transactions, query optimisation, and schema migrations. We use PostgreSQL and Prisma; you can investigate what happens beneath the ORM.
• Production ownership and debugging strength. You have shipped software that real users depend on and supported it afterwards. You can trace problems across services and databases, identify the cause, and make a durable fix.
• Security awareness. You build with authentication, authorisation, sensitive data handling, and access boundaries in mind. Therapists trust us with information that deserves careful engineering.
• Autonomy and collaboration. You identify what needs doing, make decisions, and follow through. You communicate your reasoning clearly, seek input where it matters, and help teammates work effectively with the systems you build.
• Product curiosity. Our users are therapists under time pressure. You want to understand their work and build software that makes it easier. You are willing to contribute beyond the backend when needed to deliver a complete feature.
• Clear written English and comfort working async.



Nice to Have

• LLM application engineering: evaluation, prompt pipelines, agent tooling, latency and cost optimisation.
• Audio processing, transcription, streaming, or other real-time media.
• Experience evolving backend architecture as a product and its usage grow.
• React and TypeScript frontend experience.
• Electron or another desktop platform, including native OS integration and offline behaviour.
• React Native and experience shipping mobile applications.
• Healthcare, GDPR-heavy, or other regulated environments.
• German. Our users, their documents, and our support conversations are in German.

How we work

Requirements often start as a customer quote and a clinical constraint. You should enjoy turning that into a clear problem, making technical decisions, and shipping a useful solution. We value deep backend expertise alongside the flexibility to help wherever a feature needs attention.

Model capabilities and product requirements change quickly. We work in short cycles, learn from production, and expect engineers to exercise judgment about when to move quickly and when correctness, security, or reliability requires more care.



What we offer

• An ambitious team. We became the DACH market leader for AI assistance in psychotherapy within two years, bootstrapped, with a team of 12. Our plans from here are considerably bolder.
• Autonomy and technical influence. Direct access to the CTO and founders, with meaningful ownership of architectural decisions and the code that implements them.
• Real AI engineering. Production problems, demanding workflows, and users who depend on what you build every day.
• Work that matters. Your code gives therapists hours back every week, creating more capacity in a system that badly needs it.
• Competitive salary plus equity, so you participate in the company's success.
• An office in Berlin-Mitte, flexible hours, the latest equipment, and the tools you need. Berlin-based hybrid work is our preference, and we make remote work possible for exceptional candidates.