Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (API) – Economy

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Senior / Staff Backend Engineer (API) - Economy based in United States.

This role offers the opportunity to build the backend infrastructure powering a large-scale global creator economy.

You will architect and evolve systems supporting subscriptions, digital ownership, marketplaces, payments, creator monetization, and economic analytics.

Working primarily with Node.js and TypeScript, you will design highly reliable services where correctness, traceability, and transactional integrity are essential.

You will own critical systems throughout their lifecycle, from architecture and development through deployment, monitoring, and continuous improvement.

The role combines deep technical ownership with cross-functional collaboration across Product, Data, Finance, Trust & Safety, Infrastructure, and Engineering.

At Staff level, you will additionally shape platform-wide architecture, technical strategy, and foundational economic primitives across multiple teams.

This is an impactful opportunity for an experienced backend engineer who enjoys solving complex problems and building financial-grade infrastructure at global scale.

Accountabilities

• Design, implement, and operate scalable backend services using Node.js and TypeScript for high-volume economic and transactional workloads.
• Build and evolve infrastructure supporting subscriptions, marketplaces, digital content, wallets, inventories, ownership models, entitlements, and creator payouts.
• Ensure transactional integrity, reconciliation accuracy, auditability, and reporting integrity across economic systems.
• Design reliable representations of economic events and establish traceability across payment transactions, reporting systems, and downstream services.
• Develop and maintain integrations with payment providers, fintech platforms, and other external partners.
• Build systems that support both first-party and creator-driven digital content and monetization models.
• Enable subscription, marketplace, and economic analytics by creating reliable data flows and platform capabilities.
• Contribute to fraud detection and prevention systems while maintaining appropriate controls around sensitive financial and user data.
• Lead refactoring initiatives that improve maintainability, performance, scalability, and the long-term evolution of complex codebases.
• Participate in architectural discussions and help establish the technical direction of the broader economy platform.
• Own services end-to-end, including development, deployment, monitoring, observability, incident response, and ongoing operational improvements.
• Improve CI/CD reliability, release safety, infrastructure practices, and production resilience within containerized environments.
• Contribute to Infrastructure as Code initiatives and strengthen monitoring, alerting, and observability across critical services.
• Partner closely with Product, Design, Data, Finance, Trust & Safety, Infrastructure, and other engineering teams to deliver cross-functional initiatives.
• Identify systemic technical risks and drive preventative improvements before they become operational or customer-facing issues.
• Mentor engineers, promote strong engineering practices, and contribute to raising technical standards across the organization.
• Occasionally respond to critical production issues and help restore reliable service during high-impact incidents.
• At Staff level, architect cross-team economic platform primitives such as entitlement models, payment flows, reconciliation frameworks, and event contracts.
• At Staff level, lead strategic architecture initiatives spanning multiple services, teams, and high-stakes external integrations while balancing scalability, compliance, and product velocity.

Requirements

• Have at least 5 years of backend engineering experience within SaaS, fintech, marketplaces, online platforms, or similarly complex technology environments.
• Demonstrate deep proficiency in Node.js and TypeScript and strong experience designing production-grade backend services.
• Have strong experience working with both relational and non-relational databases, including technologies such as MySQL, MongoDB, and Redis.
• Be experienced with message queues, caching strategies, WebSocket systems, and other technologies used in distributed or high-throughput environments.
• Have proven experience building and maintaining external integrations, particularly with payment vendors, fintech platforms, or other transactional systems.
• Demonstrate a strong understanding of performance profiling, optimization tradeoffs, observability, and operational resilience.
• Have experience working with PCI DSS, GDPR, PII requirements, or comparable security, privacy, and compliance frameworks.
• Bring experience building subscription engines, marketplaces, accounting systems, invoicing workflows, payment systems, or other high-integrity transactional products.
• Be familiar with AWS, Docker, CI/CD pipelines, and Infrastructure as Code practices.
• Be comfortable working across both experimental initiatives and well-defined requirements while navigating ambiguity effectively.
• Have experience contributing to complex, evolving codebases and making thoughtful architectural decisions within established systems.
• Demonstrate strong ownership and the ability to take services from design through production operation.
• Be proactive, independent, collaborative, and comfortable making decisions while working with distributed teams.
• Bring strong communication skills and a low-ego approach to technical collaboration, mentoring, and cross-team decision-making.
• Demonstrate empathy toward creators and end users and remain calm and clear-headed during high-traffic periods or critical incidents.
• For Staff-level consideration, bring credible experience designing and operating financial or high-integrity transactional systems at scale.
• For Staff-level consideration, demonstrate experience defining technical strategy, leading architecture initiatives across teams, and influencing organization-wide engineering decisions.
• Experience with event-driven or high-throughput transactional systems is a strong advantage.
• Experience integrating with payment ecosystems such as Steam, Oculus, Apple, or Google Play is a plus.
• Experience leading large-scale refactors or architectural migrations is beneficial.
• Experience building internal operational tooling or creator-facing systems is an advantage.
• Full-stack development experience is a plus.
• Familiarity with creator economies or immersive social platforms is beneficial.

Benefits

• 100% remote work with the ability to work from anywhere.
• Flexible working hours with designated periods for team collaboration.
• Health benefits.
• 401(k) for eligible US employees.
• Stock options.
• Generous paid holiday schedule.
• Unlimited and flexible vacation time.
• Paid parental leave.
• Opportunity to work on high-impact infrastructure supporting a global creator ecosystem.
• Exposure to complex technical challenges involving payments, marketplaces, subscriptions, digital ownership, and large-scale distributed systems.
• Opportunity to influence technical strategy and architecture, particularly at Staff level.