Senior Backend Scalability Engineer

Texas Sports Academy is a K-12 school designed for serious student-athletes who want both elite academics and high-level athletic development. Students learn twice as fast as traditional schools in just 2 hours a day, using the same 2-Hour Learning model as Alpha School. We are an AI-first school where AI is woven into how students learn, how the team works, and how we build and scale everything we do. That frees up their entire afternoon for serious training, where they work alongside former pro and D1 athletes coaching them at the highest standard.

We are hiring a Senior Backend Scalability Engineer on a part-time consulting contract to audit our backend systems and make the changes required to keep them fast and reliable as we scale. You will look at our services, databases, APIs, and data flows, find the bottlenecks and design flaws that will break us at the next scale step, and ship the code changes needed to fix them. You will also write clean, direct audits of what you find so our engineering team knows exactly what happened, why it matters, and how it got fixed.

What You'll Do* Audit Our Backend Systems End to End: Look at our services, APIs, databases, queues, and data flows. Find the hot spots, the design flaws, and the decisions that will not survive our next scale step. * Write Clear Audit Reports: Document what you found, why it matters, and how to fix it. Written work that our engineering team can act on directly. * Ship the Fixes: Do not stop at recommendations. Refactor the code, redesign the schemas, add the caching, fix the queries, and get the changes into production yourself where it makes sense. * Redesign for Scale Where Needed: Rework the parts of our backend that will not scale. Introduce the right patterns, split services where it helps, and remove complexity where it does not. * Optimize Databases and Data Flows: Fix slow queries, add the right indexes, rework schemas, and cut latency at the layers that actually matter. * Pa