Staff Backend Engineer

You are a seasoned technologist with a product mindset equally comfortable designing a distributed ledger service or simplifying a compliance-driven API for partner integration. You understand that technical excellence is not just about code, it's about systems that scale safely, teams that deliver predictably, and decisions that align with long-term product goals. You will be a technical north star for multiple product and platform teams, defining architecture, aligning technical strategies with business outcomes, and mentoring technical leads and senior engineers to raise the engineering bar.

The candidate will have responsibilities across the following functions:

Domain and Architectural Leadership:

• Deeply understand core financial domains (card issuance, payments orchestration, remittance, ledger systems) and translate this knowledge into resilient bounded contexts, canonical data models, and API standards.
• Define and own the long-term backend architecture roadmap, ensuring coherence across microservices and shared infrastructure.
• Champion clean architecture and Domain-Driven Design (DDD) principles, owning complex cross-domain decisions (e. g., transaction reconciliation, settlement workflows).
• Serve as the architectural authority in design reviews, incident postmortems, and roadmap discussions.

Engineering Excellence and Quality:

• Lead the engineering excellence charter, establishing organization-wide guidelines for code quality, testing, CI/CD, and security hygiene.
• Define and continuously track key engineering KPIs (e. g., Service SLAs, MTTR, Deployment Frequency) to quantify and improve outcomes.
• Mentor technical leads and senior engineers, raising the overall engineering bar and enabling Generative AI-assisted engineering workflows responsibly.

Hands-on Technical Contribution:

• Architect, prototype, and profile Go-based distributed services for high-throughput, low-latency financial flows.
• Apply expert knowledge of Go's concurrency, synchronization, and runtime tuning to design performant and scalable services.
• Lead postmortems, fault-injection sessions, and conduct deep-dive performance tuning using tools like $pprof.

Stakeholder Collaboration and Influence:

• Partner closely with Product, Compliance, Risk, and Business teams, translating functional requirements into resilient technical designs.
• Represent engineering trade-offs in executive forums and lead major cross-functional initiatives (e. g., multi-region rollout, PCI-DSS compliance).
• Maintain technical debt registers and remediation plans, acting as the technical conscience to balance delivery pace with operational integrity, security, and auditability.

Requirements:

• 8-12 years of backend engineering experience, with at least 5 years in Go in high-scale, distributed systems.
• Proven experience in architecting and scaling financial systems (payments orchestration, card processing, or ledgering).
• Expert understanding of Go concurrency, synchronization, and runtime tuning.
• Strong grounding in relational data design (PostgreSQL/MySQL) and event-driven patterns.
• Practical knowledge of security, encryption, and compliance standards (PCI-DSS, MAS, ISO 27001) in a regulated fintech environment.
• Experienced in observability and SRE practices (Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, Grafana) and capacity planning.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor senior engineers and influence technical direction at scale, including articulating complex issues to all organizational levels.
• Familiarity with IaC, Kubernetes, service mesh, and API gateways.
• Experience with AI-assisted engineering tools (e. g., Copilot, CodeWhisperer) is a plus.

Skills

Go, Golang, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Prometheus, SRE, card, financial, ledgering, observability, payments