Staff Software Engineer (Payments)

Job Description

About the team

Breakneck Studio – an incubator and accelerator scaling digital and e-commerce brands at high velocity. It’s home to our Co-Found program, where ambitious founders take products from zero to market in months, not years. This is where you get hands-on, zero-to-scale experience you won’t find in a regular job.

We are a fast-scaling travel startup with strong product-market fit, a generational traveltech company looking to disturb this sleepy industry. We are two-sided: travelers get a consumer product that helps them plan and book trips, and advisors get a SaaS-style subscription with certification and qualified leads in the offer.

We’re looking for the first developers to join a fast-growing travel startup that’s already found strong product-market fit and is now ready to scale.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage agencies, coordinate stakeholders, or spend weeks building presentations. We’re looking for a builder – someone who can design a schema for breakfast, build a sandbox environment for lunch, load test it before dinner, and wake up excited to get it ready for prod the upcoming week.

You’ll work directly with the founder and early team, own growth from day one, and help shape what the product looks like as the company scales. Work-life balance can look different in a fast-moving company that’s on a mission to make a real impact.

About the role

You’ll lead the move of our platform onto AWS and own the infrastructure and backend foundations it runs on. A big part of this role is building bulletproof background processing: queues and workers that never lose state (since they are part of our payment system), recover cleanly from failure, and scale with demand. Our current stack is TypeScript, Supabase (PostgreSQL), and TanStack, with a PHP/Laravel backend migration planned to AWS.

Ready to apply?

Jump to the application form and start your journey with us.

Get ready to

• Lead the migration of our platform to AWS, from planning the architecture to executing the cutover with minimal downtime.
• Own the migration of our PHP/Laravel backend to AWS, deciding what moves as-is and what gets re-architected along the way.
• Design and build background processing for our payment flows: queues and workers that never lose state, handle retries and idempotency correctly, and recover cleanly from failure.
• Make sure every job and transaction is traceable and auditable, so nothing goes missing between systems.
• Build infrastructure that scales with demand, including autoscaling workers, managing load spikes, and keeping costs under control as we grow.
• Set up infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and environments (dev, staging, prod) that let the team ship quickly and safely.
• Put monitoring, logging, and alerting in place so problems are caught early and diagnosed fast.
• Own security and reliability across the infrastructure, including access control, secrets management, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Strengthen the backend foundations of our TypeScript, Supabase (PostgreSQL), and TanStack stack so it can support production scale.
• Work directly with the founder and early team on infrastructure decisions that affect the product, and set the standards future engineers will build on.

Requirements

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with deep experience in Platform / Cloud Engineering (AWS) and Backend Software Engineering (PHP, Laravel, PostgreSQL).
• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise, especially SQS (standard and FIFO, visibility timeouts, DLQs), S3 (lifecycle policies, access control, presigned URLs, event notifications), and related services such as Lambda, ECS/Fargate, IAM, EventBridge and CloudWatch.
• Production experience with PHP and Laravel, including Laravel Queues, Horizon or equivalent, and designing backend services on PostgreSQL.
• Proven track record building highly reliable worker and queue systems: retry strategies with exponential backoff, idempotent job design, exactly-once or effectively-once processing, dead-letter queues, and state handling that survives crashes, deploys and partial failures.
• Experience planning and delivering complex platform migrations with minimal downtime, ideally including moving from a managed platform such as Supabase to self-managed AWS infrastructure.
• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform, AWS CDK or Pulumi, plus CI/CD pipeline design.
• Strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting and incident response, using tools such as Datadog.
• Solid understanding of modern authentication and identity concepts (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML) and cloud security best practices, including IAM least privilege and secrets management.
• Comfortable in an agile, collaborative environment and communicating effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Experience leading technical initiatives, influencing architectural decisions or providing technical leadership across teams.

Nice to have

• TypeScript experience is an advantage, as it is the team’s primary development language.

Company offers

• Health insurance (after probation)
• On-site physiotherapist
• Office gym and fitness classes
• 7 extra days off
• 3 days off for weddings
• Hybrid work
• Freedom to work 2 months from anywhere in the world
• Pet-friendly office
• Fresh breakfasts and hot lunches
• Drawers and fridges stocked with snacks and food
• Rooftop and cellar events
• 10 social clubs
• Public transport card for Vilnius
• Perks.lt perks
• €1000 yearly budget for coaching, mentorship, training, conferences, online courses, subscriptions, books
• Opportunity to step in as a co-founder
• €1500 for every successful referral