Backend Engineer, Payments
About The Position
Speak is hiring its first dedicated payments engineer to own the reliability of subscription payments. Payments run through Paddle, RevenueCat for App Store and Google Play, and Stripe, with additional providers planned. The engineer will be the point person responsible for how Speak bills and renews subscriptions and grants access to learners. Initially embedded with a growth team that owns monetization, the role will eventually be anchored within the platform organization. As the first engineer in this area, this person will establish the payments architecture, standards, and roadmap with substantial autonomy and a direct connection to revenue. The role involves end-to-end ownership of subscription payment reliability, building and maintaining provider integrations in Node.js, designing robust payment processing and reconciliation, and establishing operational monitoring and incident practices. It also includes setting standards for changes to payment systems, partnering with growth, product, finance, and support, and mentoring engineers. The position is based in San Francisco and requires working in person at least three days per week.
Requirements
- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including staff-level ownership of production systems.
- Deep experience building and operating recurring subscription billing for a consumer product.
- Hands-on experience with App Store or Google Play billing, directly or through RevenueCat, Stripe Billing, or Paddle.
- Strong backend fundamentals in Node.js and TypeScript or a comparable language, with solid relational database skills.
- A track record of improving payment-system reliability, including reducing incidents, improving reconciliation, and making migrations safer.
- Ability to define a roadmap in an area that does not yet have one.
- Clear communication with engineering, product, and finance partners.
- Contribute to an AI-native development workflow by reviewing plans and designs before implementation, creating strong verification loops, and shipping safely with AI-assisted tooling.
- Excited to work in person in San Francisco at least three days per week.
Nice To Haves
- Experience migrating between payment providers or consolidating several providers into one system.
- Experience with international payments, taxes, and currencies, especially across APAC markets.
- Experience working on an app used by 1M+ users.
- Experience building entitlement systems shared across mobile and web.
Responsibilities
- Own the reliability of subscription payments end to end, from purchase and renewal through cancellation, refunds, and entitlements.
- Build and maintain integrations with Paddle, RevenueCat, and Stripe in Node.js, and lead the rollout of new payment providers.
- Design for correctness, including idempotent webhook handling, reconciliation across providers, and safe retries.
- Implement monitoring, alerting, and runbooks to detect payment issues before they affect learners or finance.
- Lead payment incident response and postmortems, and address root causes.
- Set standards for how other teams change payment code and review changes that affect billing.
- Partner with growth, product, finance, and support on pricing, paywall experiments, and revenue reporting.
- Mentor engineers and raise reliability standards across the backend.
Benefits
- Opportunity to join a fast-growing company after its Series C and make a significant impact.
- Collaborative, tight-knit team focused on craft and professional growth.
- Opportunity to work with users across global markets and travel.
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What This Job Offers
Job Type
Full-time
Career Level
Senior
Education Level
No Education Listed
