Grpc not caching

New to circleci so bare with me :sweat_smile:
Trying to just lint an express app that lives in the backend/core folder of our repo. I implemented the npm caching example to speed up builds but one of our dependencies is grpc for gcloud and it reinstalls all over again each time.

Any ideas what I can do here?

 # Use the latest 2.1 version of CircleCI pipeline process engine. See: https://circleci.com/docs/2.0/configuration-reference

# default executors
executors:
  core-executor:
    docker:
      - image: 'cimg/base:stable'

commands:
  init_env:
    description: initialize environment
    steps:
      - checkout
      - node/install
      - restore_cache:
          keys:
            # when lock file changes, use increasingly general patterns to restore cache
            - node-v1-{{ .Branch }}-{{ checksum "backend/core/package-lock.json" }}
            - node-v1-{{ .Branch }}-
            - node-v1-

      - run: npm --prefix ./backend/core install

      - save_cache:
          paths:
            - ~/usr/local/lib/node_modules  # location depends on npm version
          key: node-v1-{{ .Branch }}-{{ checksum "backend/core/package-lock.json" }}


jobs:
  install-node:
    executor: core-executor
    steps:
      - checkout
      - node/install
      - run: node --version
      - run: pwd
      - run: ls -A
      - run: npm --prefix ./backend/core install

  lint:
    executor: core-executor
    steps:
      - init_env
      - run: pwd
      - run: ls -A
      - run: ls backend
      - run: ls backend/core -A
      - run: npm --prefix ./backend/core run lint


orbs:
  node: circleci/node@4.1.0
version: 2.1
workflows:
  test_my_app:
    jobs:
      #- install-node
      - lint
          #requires:
            #- install-node