Backend Developer

About WeDoBooks

WeDoBooks is a tech company headquartered in Aarhus, working to get more people to read more. We are the leading Nordic player in digital book distribution, and right now we are building Publizon - the platform that will replace legacy systems and become the distribution backbone for digital literature in the Nordics.

More than 4,000 publishers across the Nordics already use our platforms as their primary route to every digital sales channel: bookshops, streaming services, schools and libraries. We are also the largest Nordic supplier of digital library solutions in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, with products like eReolen, Biblio and BookBites.

We are a company that is growing up - ambitious and expanding into Europe, but deliberately keeping the agility that lets us do the right thing for a customer quickly.

About the role

You are joining Pipeline Builders, the backend team behind Publizon. This is the team that owns everything between a publisher uploading a book and a reader opening it: metadata ingestion, the content pipeline, the distribution logic, and the APIs that the Nordic book market integrates against.

The role is deliberately broad. Publizon is not a single service - it is ONIX metadata processing, media pipelines, distribution rules, partner APIs and a live migration off legacy platforms, all running at once. You will own significant parts of it, design the APIs external partners build on top of.

You will work day to day with our backend tech lead, our DevOps engineer, frontend developers and Product Owners - and you will have direct contact with the technical teams at our partners. There is no layer between you and the people using what you build.

What you will be working on

• Build and operate backend services in TypeScript on Google Cloud.

• Design, document and evolve the public APIs that retailers, streaming services and libraries integrate against - ingestion, retailer, catalog, ONIX and reporting.

• Work with ONIX, the bibliographic metadata standard the entire book industry runs on: schema validation, codelists, versioning and market-specific subsets.

• Develop the content pipeline - EPUB validation, audio encoding, encryption and DRM, sample generation and delivery.

• Build the reporting and data pipeline that turns usage and sales telemetry into numbers publishers can act on.

• Support the migration from our legacy platforms onto Publizon, including data reconciliation across hundreds of thousands of titles.

• Onboard and troubleshoot outbound sales channels.

• Take part in code review and our continuous release process.

Your profile

We are open on level. Whether you are a strong mid-level developer ready to take on real ownership, or a senior who wants to own a domain end to end, we would like to hear from you.

We expect you to have

• Solid backend experience with TypeScript and Node.js - or deep experience in another strongly typed backend language and a genuine appetite to move to TypeScript.

• Experience designing and maintaining REST APIs that external parties integrate against, and the discipline to document them properly.

• Experience with a major cloud platform. We run on Google Cloud (Cloud Run, Cloud Functions, Cloud Tasks, BigQuery, Firebase) - an AWS or Azure background transfers fine.

• Confidence with relational databases and SQL; PostgreSQL is our main store.

• Experience with asynchronous, event-driven processing: queues, background jobs, retries and idempotency.

• Code others can operate - sensible logging, tracing and error handling, because you will be debugging your own services in production.

• Ownership. This is a flat organisation with high individual ownership; we expect you to drive your area rather than wait for tickets.

• Professional English, written and spoken - English is our working language in engineering.

It is an advantage if you also have

• Experience with XML-based data standards - ONIX, MARC or similar.

• Media pipelines: transcoding, streaming, encryption or DRM.

• Infrastructure as code (Terraform/Terragrunt) and CI/CD pipelines.

• Firebase and Firestore.

• Experience keeping a legacy system alive while migrating off it.

• AI co-development experience or other ways of utilization of AI in relevant job scenarios.

• Knowledge of the book industry, publishing or digital distribution.

• Danish, Swedish or Norwegian.