Senior Hono Developer, Performance & Edge Engineering

About the Role

We are looking for a Senior Hono Developer with a performance-first mindset to build and optimize high-performance backend services and APIs using Hono, TypeScript, and modern Edge runtimes.

This role goes far beyond writing API endpoints. You will be responsible for architecting how requests are routed, processed, cached, and served across distributed infrastructure to achieve low latency, high throughput, and predictable performance at global scale.

If you care deeply about why an API is fast, not just that it works, this role is for you.

Responsibilities

Architect and develop backend services using Hono, leveraging:

• Lightweight, composable middleware architecture
• Edge-first and serverless execution models
• Type-safe API design
• Streaming and incremental response patterns
• Efficient request lifecycle management

Decide what renders where:

• Edge vs Origin
• Server vs Edge Worker
• Synchronous vs asynchronous processing
• Blocking vs streaming responses
• Pre-computed vs on-demand data

Optimize real-world backend performance metrics:

• Latency and TTFB
• Throughput and concurrency
• p95 / p99 response times
• Cold start and execution time
• CPU and memory utilization

Design and implement multi-layer caching strategies:

• Browser / HTTP cache
• CDN cache
• Edge cache
• Application cache
• Read-through / write-through caching
• Revalidation and stale-while-revalidate patterns

Work deeply with Edge infrastructure:

• Request routing
• PoPs (Points of Presence)
• Edge locality
• Edge Compute vs Origin trade-offs

Optimize data delivery:

• JSON vs streaming responses
• Serialization and deserialization
• Pagination
• Partial responses
• Incremental data fetching
• Minimizing network round trips

Optimize compression & transport:

• HTTP/2
• HTTP/3
• Keep-alive and connection reuse
• Compression
• Cache-Control
• ETag and conditional requests
• Streaming responses

High-performance Edge APIs are meaningless if every request still waits on a centralized database. You will be expected to think critically about where data lives, how it is accessed, and how frequently the Origin needs to be contacted.

You should be comfortable with:

• Designing Edge-friendly data access patterns.
• Evaluating centralized databases vs globally distributed data stores.
• Understanding strong consistency vs eventual consistency.
• Minimizing database access through caching and precomputation.
• Designing event-driven cache invalidation.
• Handling distributed state.
• Identifying database and network bottlenecks before they become production incidents.

Collaborate with frontend, backend, DevOps, and infrastructure teams to ensure production-grade performance, scalability, and reliability.

Required Qualifications

5+ years of experience in backend, full-stack, or web engineering.

Strong expertise in TypeScript / JavaScript.

Strong production experience with Hono.

Deep understanding of:

• Hono routing
• Middleware
• Context
• Error handling
• Validation
• Type-safe API design

Experience deploying Hono applications to one or more of:

• Cloudflare Workers
• Bun
• Deno
• Node.js

Deep understanding of the HTTP request lifecycle:

• Client → CDN → Edge → Origin → Database
• HTTP methods and status codes
• Headers
• Cookies
• Authentication
• Caching

Strong knowledge of:

• REST API architecture
• API performance optimization
• HTTP caching
• Authentication and authorization
• Rate limiting
• Request validation
• Error handling
• Observability and structured logging

Ability to analyze and act on:

• API latency
• p95 / p99 performance
• Distributed traces
• Production logs
• Network traces
• Database query performance
• Production telemetry

Nice to Have

Experience with Cloudflare Workers and the broader Cloudflare ecosystem.

Experience building Edge Functions or serverless applications.

Experience with streaming APIs and streaming responses.

Experience optimizing high-traffic or latency-sensitive APIs.

Experience with event-driven architectures.

Strong system design thinking applied to backend architecture.

Experience with Edge-friendly databases and infrastructure, such as: Upstash Redis, Kafka, Cloudflare D1, KV, R2, PlanetScale, Neon.

Familiarity with: Serverless database latency characteristics, Distributed caching, Message queues, Event-driven systems, Distributed systems fundamentals

What We Value

You don't just make APIs work, you make them fast by design.

You understand why something is slow, not just how to patch it.

You ask the right questions:

• Does this request really need to hit the Origin?
• Can this response be served directly from the Edge?
• Does this data really need to be fetched synchronously?
• Which cache layer gives us the best payoff?
• Are we introducing unnecessary database latency?
• Can this operation be streamed instead of blocking?
• What happens to p99 latency when traffic increases globally?

What We Offer

• Real-world performance challenges, not toy problems.
• Ownership over backend architecture and API performance.
• Opportunities to design Edge-first systems from the ground up.
• A technically mature team that values correct solutions.
• Competitive compensation based on expertise.
• Flexible working location and hours.