Senior Backend Engineer - Payments Platform

The Role:

You are full stack but you live on the backend. You care deeply about what happens when a payment fails, an API returns an unexpected response, or a queue backs up at 2am. You will own the backend services, payment workflows, and event-driven systems that sit at the core of our platform — and you will touch the frontend when the team needs it.

This is a high-intensity role at an early-stage company. This role will ask more of you than a typical engineering job — systems need to stay up, deadlines are real, and the team is small.

Responsibilities:

• Production Node.js backend services and REST APIs — versioned, contract-stable, and hardened

• ACH payment workflows end-to-end — debits, credits, retries, failure handling, virtual account ledgering, and reconciliation

• Event-driven services using AWS SQS and webhooks for reliable asynchronous processing

• PostgreSQL schemas that support complex financial workflows with integrity under failure

• CI/CD contributions and test coverage that gives the team genuine confidence to ship

• Internal React dashboards and operational tooling when needed

• Design documentation, deployment runbooks, and scalability notes that you write because you are proud of the work — not because someone asked

• You will occasionally work directly with customers to support integrations, troubleshoot live workflows, and demonstrate platform capabilities — you are comfortable representing the product outside the codebase

Requirements:

Must Have:

• 6–7 years engineering experience with a strong backend focus

• Production Node.js and REST API design

• Solid PostgreSQL — schema design, query optimization, data integrity

• AWS — Lambda, RDS, SQS, API Gateway, Secrets Manager

• OpenAPI / Swagger documentation experience

• Event-driven systems experience — queues, webhooks, retry and failure logic

• CI/CD pipeline experience and automated deployment workflows

• You obsess over API design, documentation, deployment, scalability, and observability

• Cross-functional communicator — comfortable working directly with Product, QA, DevOps, and business stakeholders

• Agile practitioner — sprint planning, backlog grooming, and code reviews are second nature

• End-to-end owner — you do not hand off, you follow through to production

Strong Plus:

• ACH payment workflows and NACHA operating rules

• Wire, debit card, and real-time payment rail experience beyond ACH

• Experience with Java, Spring frameworks, or similar enterprise backend frameworks

• Regulated fintech compliance — audit logging, idempotency, SOC 2

• NestJS or similar structured Node.js frameworks

• AI-assisted development tools — Claude, GitHub Copilot, Cursor

• Team lead experience with mentoring junior team members