Staff Backend Engineer | JVM

Accountabilities:

You will take ownership of backend technical strategy and platform health, helping engineering teams deliver secure, scalable, and high-performing services while establishing shared standards and practices across the organization.

Backend Architecture & Business Impact

Drive backend technical direction and architectural decisions across multiple engineering squads.

Deliver measurable business improvements in areas such as payment success rates, customer onboarding, marketplace conversion, and engineering delivery speed.

Collaborate with Product, Risk, and Growth teams to improve high-volume revenue flows, including credit decisioning, onboarding, merchant checkout, payments, repayments, and collections.

Reduce latency, transaction failures, and manual workarounds while improving customer and merchant experiences.

Own the end-to-end health of the platform, including reliability, scalability, performance, security, infrastructure cost, and operational simplicity.

Platform Foundations & Engineering Standards

Design and promote shared engineering foundations, including service templates, reusable libraries, messaging and event standards, CI/CD pipelines, and release practices.

Partner with Platform and Site Reliability Engineering teams, as well as product engineering squads, to drive adoption of consistent backend practices.

Define and support Service Level Objectives (SLOs) and error budgets based on service criticality.

Lead root-cause analysis for complex production incidents and ensure corrective actions prevent recurring issues.

Translate security and quality requirements—including authentication, authorization, personal data protection, OWASP, PCI, secrets management, and dependency scanning—into automated CI checks and engineering standards.

Establish testing expectations across contract, integration, and other critical application flows.

AI-Native Engineering

Drive the adoption of agentic coding tools and AI-assisted development practices across backend engineering teams.

Establish conventions, skills, specification templates, and CI safeguards for tools such as Claude Code and Factory Droid, or equivalent solutions.

Ensure AI-generated code meets security, reliability, and quality standards before deployment.

Encourage specification-driven development and continuously improve team conventions and tooling based on practical experience.

Technical Leadership & Collaboration

Write and drive adoption of technical RFCs and Architecture Decision Records (ADRs) covering service boundaries, data ownership, event contracts, consistency, idempotency, testing, and security.

Build alignment among Engineering, Product, Risk, Security, and Data stakeholders around technical priorities and trade-offs.

Communicate complex architectural decisions clearly to technical teams and senior leadership, connecting engineering investments to business outcomes.

Influence engineering practices through technical credibility, clear documentation, and constructive collaboration.

Mentor Senior Engineers and support their development toward Staff Engineer and Tech Lead responsibilities.

Contribute to technical hiring, interviewer calibration, engineering reviews, and initiatives that strengthen the organization's engineering culture.

Participate in incident leadership and the on-call culture, supporting systems responsible for financial transactions and credit decisions.

Requirements:

The ideal candidate is a highly experienced backend engineer with a strong JVM background, a proven record of designing distributed systems at scale, and the ability to influence technical decisions across multiple teams. You should combine architectural judgment with business awareness, strong communication, and a practical approach to engineering execution.

15+ years of professional experience building production software.

8+ years of experience owning the architecture of large-scale distributed backend systems.

4+ years in a Staff Engineer, Principal Engineer, or Software Architect role, driving technical decisions across multiple engineering squads.

Deep expertise in the JVM ecosystem, including Java, Kotlin, or Scala, and Spring Boot.

Strong experience with SQL and PostgreSQL, Redis, messaging technologies such as Kafka, SQS, or RabbitMQ, event-driven architecture, AWS, and Kubernetes.

Demonstrated ability to design and scale complex architectures, including service boundaries, data consistency, messaging patterns, and zero-downtime deployments.

Proven experience defining technical standards or shared platform capabilities adopted by at least four engineering teams.

Experience writing RFCs and ADRs, securing stakeholder alignment, and driving technical proposals through implementation and adoption.

Strong judgment when balancing delivery speed, reliability, infrastructure cost, and long-term maintainability.

Experience leading significant architectural modernization or re-engineering initiatives, such as decomposing monoliths or redesigning core domains, while maintaining product delivery and service availability.

A track record of defining SLOs and delivering measurable improvements in availability, p95/p99 latency, throughput, or infrastructure costs.

Experience establishing security practices across teams, including authentication, authorization, personal data protection, OWASP, and PCI requirements.

Strong understanding of testing strategies across unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing.

Experience leading complex production incident investigations and implementing long-term reliability improvements.

Hands-on experience with agentic coding tools such as Claude Code, Factory Droid, or similar solutions as part of regular development workflows.

Experience establishing AI-assisted engineering practices at team or organizational level, including conventions, specification templates, and CI safeguards.

Ability to connect backend architecture decisions to business outcomes involving credit risk, payments, conversion, and operational costs.

Strong communication and stakeholder management skills, including the ability to influence Engineering Managers, Product, Risk, Security, and Data teams without direct authority.

Experience owning high-volume payment, credit decisioning, ledger, or onboarding systems within fintech, banking, lending, or marketplace environments.

Understanding of regulated financial systems, including idempotency, reconciliation, auditability, compliance, and data integrity.

Experience mentoring engineers and helping senior technical talent progress into broader leadership roles.

Nice to Have:

Familiarity with API gateways, GraphQL, Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layers, and third-party integrations such as payment processors and credit bureaus.

Experience with end-to-end authentication flows, including OAuth, token issuance, and token refresh.

Experience shaping technical hiring standards, engineering review processes, or technical communities and guilds.

Benefits:

Competitive compensation.

Equity participation, offering meaningful ownership in the company's growth.

Opportunity to work on products that improve access to financial services and transform how people shop, pay, and bank.

Significant technical ownership and the opportunity to shape platform architecture and engineering strategy.

High-impact role in a fast-growing organization with substantial opportunities for professional growth.

Opportunity to collaborate with an international team of experienced professionals.

A culture centered on ownership, technical excellence, collaboration, and continuous improvement.