Talent Network: Senior Back-end Engineer (Creator)

About Toptal

Toptal is a global network of top talent in business, design, and technology that enables companies to scale their teams, on-demand. With $200+ million in annual revenue and team members based around the globe, Toptal is the world’s largest fully remote workforce.

We take the best elements of virtual teams and combine them with a support structure that encourages innovation, social interaction, and fun. We see no borders, move at a fast pace, and are never afraid to break the mold.

Job Summary

Our product reads data from social platforms — YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and others — to give creators a clear view of their business. The integrations we build with these platforms are the data foundation of everything else we do. Every other engineer reads the data this role makes available.

You will own these integrations end-to-end. You will design the framework that lets us add a new platform connector in days rather than weeks. You will operate the integrations in production: rotating tokens, handling rate limits, recovering from outages, building graceful failure paths so a broken third-party API does not break our product. As we grow, you will lead the integration of new platforms — Stripe, email service providers, podcast hosts, e-commerce platforms.

This is a high-impact, high-autonomy role. Platform API risk is the single biggest technical risk to our business, and you will be the person we trust to manage it.

This is a remote position. We do not offer visa sponsorship or assistance. Resumes and communication must be submitted in English.

Responsibilities

• Build and maintain production integrations with the YouTube Data API, the Meta Graph API (Instagram and Facebook), and the TikTok * * * Display API. Three to start; more to follow.

• Design a Connector framework — a clean internal interface that abstracts the differences between platforms, so the rest of the team can read normalized data without thinking about which platform it came from.

• Build OAuth flows, scheduled data ingestion, and a queue-based architecture for reliable background work.

• Operate connectors in production: monitor health, freshness, and error rates; rotate credentials; respond to platform changelog updates; maintain a runbook per platform.

• Build graceful degradation paths. When a platform API is failing, our product should tell the user honestly and let them edit the data manually — never silently break.

• Partner with the product manager to define what users see when each platform misbehaves.

Qualifications and Job Requirements:

• Four or more years of backend engineering experience, with strong production work in Node.js or TypeScript, and PostgreSQL.

• Required: You have shipped and maintained at least one production integration with the YouTube Data API, Meta Graph API, or TikTok API. (Experience with at least one of these specific social platforms is a must-have for this role).

• Strong understanding of OAuth 2.0, token rotation, rate limiting, retry strategies, exponential backoff, and queue-based architectures.

• You have used a background job system in production — Inngest, Trigger.dev, BullMQ, Sidekiq, Temporal, or similar.

• You have an operational mindset. You do not assume APIs work; you assume they will fail in unexpected ways and you build for it. You have been on call for production systems and you know the difference between a quiet incident and a loud one.

• You write clean, maintainable code, and you are comfortable owning a system end-to-end including its monitoring and incident response.

Bonus points

• Experience with other creator-economy tools or third-party APIs (Stripe, Twilio, Salesforce, etc.).

• Familiarity with monitoring and alerting tools (Sentry, Datadog, Grafana, etc.).

• Comfort with infrastructure work — Postgres tuning, Supabase or Neon, AWS or Cloudflare.

Tech stack

• TypeScript

• Next.js

• PostgreSQL (Supabase or Neon)

• Prisma or Drizzle

• Inngest or Trigger.dev for background jobs

• Clerk for authentication

• Sentry and PostHog for observability.

We are a single-monolith codebase by deliberate choice and intend to stay that way for some time.

What success looks like

• In your first 90 days: you have delivered the first three platform connectors in production, established the Connector framework, and set up monitoring and runbooks.

• By month six: you have added one to two more platform integrations, and the connector layer is operating with high reliability — measured by data freshness, error rates, and time-to-recovery on outages.