Senior Backend Engineer (Mandarin Speaking) at LemFi

About our Company:

LemFi (YC S21, Series B) is revolutionizing cross-border financial services for immigrants through its multi-currency platform, processing over $1 billion in monthly transactions. We provide instant remittances, foreign exchange services, and multi-currency accounts, all in one seamless experience.

With 300+ employees across 15+ countries, our platform supports twelve currencies and integrates directly with local banks and mobile money providers, ensuring fast, low-cost transactions. But we’re not stopping at payments. LemFi is building a comprehensive financial ecosystem empowering immigrants with the financial tools they need to thrive—wherever they go.

Our vision: To build the first full-stack financial services hub for the world’s immigrant population. 🚀

Who You Are:

Join a fast-growing, multinational fintech startup where collaboration, humility, and ownership define how we work. At LemFi, we’re passionate about solving complex financial challenges while delivering an exceptional customer experience across borders. Our teams are deeply committed to their craft and regularly contribute beyond their core responsibilities to help each other succeed.

We are looking for an experienced Backend Engineer to help us expand and support our Remittance platform, with a specific focus on our growing Chinese-speaking customer segment.

• Impact-Oriented: You care deeply about solving real problems. You focus on delivering reliable, maintainable solutions that drive clear business and user value.
• Technically Grounded: You have solid experience building and operating scalable backend systems using Go Lang. You write clean, production-ready code and apply good judgment to architecture, performance, and reliability trade-offs.
• Collaborative by Nature: You work well with engineers, product managers, and business stakeholders alike. You listen carefully, communicate clearly, and believe in shared success over individual credit.
• Ownership Mindset: You take full responsibility for the systems you build from design and development to monitoring and incident response. You don’t wait to be told what to do and are comfortable making decisions within your domain.
• Always Improving: You’re naturally curious and seek opportunities to grow your technical skills and expand your understanding of the broader system. You're open to feedback and use it to get better.

Job Description & Responsibilities

Engineering & Architecture

• Design, implement, and test new backend features with an emphasis on simplicity, scalability, and security.
• Create technical documentation to support proposed solutions and feature development.
• Apply best practices in automated testing as a fundamental part of your development workflow.
• Uphold strong data consistency standards and prioritize privacy and security in all code handling financial transactions.
• Write clean, maintainable, and self-documenting code.
• Stay current with modern backend patterns to help build a cost-effective, cloud-native architecture.

Localization & Market Adaptation

• Collaborate with product and business stakeholders to design features tailored to the China remittance corridor.
• Engage regularly with Chinese-speaking integration partners to coordinate development and support.
• Support translation, content reviews, and localization efforts to improve product accessibility for the Chinese-speaking diaspora.

Operations & Reliability

• Rollouts new features gradually with techniques such as feature flags, blue-green deployments, and traffic ramp-ups.
• Build and monitor SLAs and SLOs with automated product metrics and alerting.
• Participate in the on-call rotation as part of our “you build it, you run it” ownership model.

Ownership & Collaboration

• Take end-to-end ownership of features from concept to deployment and post-release support.
• Collaborate closely with cross-functional teams including Engineering, QA, and Product.
• Ensure your work aligns with international financial regulations and customer needs.
• Mentor junior developers and contribute to a team culture of continuous learning, technical excellence, and ownership.

Qualifications

Technical Expertise:

• 5+ years of professional experience in backend development (Go Lang).
• Deep knowledge of Go Lang, with hands-on experience building scalable services.
• Experience with working with observability stack (logging, metrics, tracing).
• Expertise in building RESTful APIs following company standards.
• Understanding of Domain-Driven Design and Modularization concepts.
• Asynchronous processing with approaches like co-routines, messages queuing and event streaming (Kafka).
• Experience working with relational databases (PostgreSQL) such as evolving schemas, transaction isolation levels and writing optimal SQL queries.
• Understanding caching patterns (Redis).

Cloud-native tools:

• Experience with Docker and similar container technologies
• Knowledge of operational aspects of Amazon Web Services key services (S3, ECS, ECR, RDS etc) or a similar Cloud provider

Soft Skills:

• Strong problem-solving and analytical skills with a detail-oriented mindset.
• High sense of ownership and accountability for delivering top-quality work.
• Excellent communication and collaboration skills, with the ability to work effectively in a team.

Language Requirements:

• Professional fluency in English
• Professional fluency in Mandarin required.
• Ability to read and write Simplified Chinese preferred for content localization.

Nice to Haves:

• Experience setting up CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions)
• Solid understanding of writing secure code in compliance with international standards (PCI, OWASP)
• #LI-Remote