The core responsibilities for the job include the following:
In your first 6 to 12 months, you will:
- Own end-to-end architecture for critical money movement systems such as transaction orchestration, ledgers, reconciliation, pricing pipelines, or partner integrations.
- Set technical direction and standards for backend systems, including correctness guarantees, failure handling, observability, and API design.
- Lead system design for new initiatives by decomposing ambiguous business problems into scalable, reliable architectures.
- Reduce systemic operational risk by identifying cross-service failure modes, data inconsistencies, and scalability bottlenecks.
- Be the final technical reviewer for designs and critical changes that affect correctness, money movement, or platform stability.
- Mentor and level up engineers by reviewing designs, code, and incident responses, and by modelling strong ownership.
- Partner closely with Product, Ops, Risk, and Infra leadership to align technical decisions with business priorities.
- Move core system metrics such as transaction success rate, latency, incident frequency, and reconciliation accuracy across multiple services.
You will be measured on:
- System quality at scale: Core systems are correct, resilient, and observable even under failure and peak load.
- Technical leadership: Engineers make better decisions because of the standards, guidance, and reviews you provide.
- Operational excellence: Incidents are fewer, smaller in blast radius, and faster to resolve.
- Execution leverage: Teams ship faster with less rework due to clear architecture and decision-making.
- Trust: Product, Ops, and Engineering leaders rely on your judgment for high-stakes decisions.
Requirements:
- 6 to 10+ years building backend systems in production environments.
- Proven ownership of large, business-critical backend systems.
- Strong fundamentals in system design, data modeling, and backend engineering.
- Deep experience with failures, retries, concurrency, and distributed systems.
- Track record of making and defending hard technical tradeoffs.
- Experience mentoring senior engineers and influencing technical direction.
- Ability to clearly communicate complex technical decisions to nontechnical stakeholders.
Preferred (accelerates ramp, not required):
- Experience in fintech, payments, or high transaction volume systems.
- Experience designing ledgers or financial correctness systems.
- Hands-on experience with PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, or similar technologies.
- Strong observability and incident management experience.
- Prior experience as a tech lead or senior engineer.
