Backend Developer (Node.js / AWS) — iTakeControl

Red Nucleus is hiring a Backend Developer (Node.js/AWS) - iTakeControl to join our global team. This role will be fully onsite at our Pune office. There may be flexibility to transition to a hybrid work model in the future, based on business

. Our purpose is advancing knowledge to improve lives. We succeed by being the premier provider of strategic learning and development, scientific advisory services, and medical communications solutions for the life sciences industry. Our global team is composed of nearly 800 full-time employees whose commitment to creativity, quality, and on-time delivery is unrivaled in our space. At Red Nucleus, we believe in providing a rich working environment that pushes us to innovate in ways that engages our employees to be their best selves. Our culture is about meaningful work, a true sense of community, and fun. We love to celebrate our people and we are proud to have been Internationally recognized as a “Great Place to Work". How You Will Contribute In this position, you will be working with our Clinical Research team. For more information, please visit ITC I Red Nucleus.

iTakeControl is a clinical trial platform supporting live studies within a validated, GxP-compliant environment. We are bringing the platform fully in-house and building the team that will own and grow it. We are looking for a strong Backend Developer to own and advance the platform’s server-side systems as a hands-on, code-first contributor. The backend is the most complex and most critical part of the platform — handling authentication and role-based access, clinical study data, background processing, integrations, and a substantial server-side video and media pipeline — all on live data where stability and integrity carry regulatory weight. Working under the technical direction of the Technical Lead, you will write production-quality backend code, keep the system stable and secure, and make sound decisions on a large, established codebase. The nature of this role: this is deep server-side engineering, not light API glue. The day-to-day work is service and data-layer design, asynchronous and queue-based processing, integrations, performance and memory management, and safe schema changes against a live production database. The platform also has a significant media dimension — server-side video processing and video-call infrastructure — that this role helps own. We are looking for an engineer who reasons about data integrity, concurrency, and failure modes, not only request/response handlers. This is the foundational engineering seat on the team and works closely with the Technical Lead from day one. It works with US-based stakeholders and requires regular overlap with US hours, particularly around releases. What You’ll Own • Core APIs and business logic — build and maintain the platform’s server-side services and business rules to a production-quality standard, with correct authentication and role-based authorisation on every path • Data layer and migrations — design schema and queries against a relational database, and make changes to a live, regulated production database safely and exclusively through reviewed, reversible migrations • Asynchronous and background processing — job queues, scheduled jobs, and worker pools for long-running and CPU-intensive work, with correct handling of concurrency, locking, retries, and idempotency • Video and media pipeline — contribute to the server-side video and media systems: video processing and conversion, recording, and the integration that powers video calls (a core, high-value part of the platform) • Integrations and data flows — cloud services (storage, messaging and queues), file handling and uploads, data import/export, ETL jobs, and study-configuration syncing • Security, secrets, and compliance — handle PHI safely, manage secrets through the platform’s secret store, and preserve audit trails, electronic-record integrity, and ALCOA+ data-integrity controls • Stability, performance, and observability — troubleshoot production issues, manage memory and performance on the running services, and use metrics and structured logging to keep the platform healthy • Codebase fluency and collaboration — build deep understanding of the existing system during the vendor handover, keep documentation current for the areas you own, take part in code reviews, and align API contracts with the frontend and mobile developers • You will partner closely with the Technical Lead, who owns technical direction; this role owns the hands-on delivery and quality of the backend. What We’re Looking For This is a hands-on engineering role. We are looking for proven, production backend capability across the areas below — what you can do matters more than titles held. Core Engineering Skills (must-have) • Node.js backend engineering — strong, current, hands-on experience building production server-side applications in Node.js, with a solid grasp of asynchronous JavaScript and how to write reliable, maintainable services at scale (we run a current Node.js version with ESM and Express) • API design and authorisation — designing and maintaining RESTful and/or RPC-style APIs with sound authentication, role-based access control, input validation, and robust error handling • Relational databases and ORM — strong experience with MySQL or PostgreSQL and an ORM such as Sequelize: schema design, complex queries and joins, transactions, query optimisation, and disciplined, reversible migrations on live data • Asynchronous and background processing — practical experience with job queues (e.g. Bull or equivalent) and scheduled work, and the judgement to get concurrency right — locking, retries, idempotency, and avoiding the race conditions that surface in distributed processing • AWS cloud services — working experience with core services such as S3, SNS, and SQS, and IAM-based access, using a current AWS SDK • Secure coding and PHI handling — sound everyday security instincts (OWASP-aware), careful handling of sensitive data, and an understanding that secrets belong in a secret store, not in code or config • Automated backend testing — writing unit and integration tests and shipping features together with their test coverage • Version control and collaboration — strong Git workflows and a habit of writing reviewable, well-documented code Media and Video (core to this role) • Server-side media or video processing is a significant and ongoing part of this seat. Direct experience with video/media processing pipelines — for example transcoding or conversion (ffmpeg or similar), recording, streaming, or video-call infrastructure (WebRTC or a video SDK) — is a strong advantage. For an otherwise strong backend engineer, a genuine aptitude and appetite to take this on is acceptable, but this is an area