Principal Backend Engineer

Highline

5d•Remote

About The Position

We are hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to serve as the technical leader and architect for Highline’s platform. This is a foundational hire - you will own system design, guide engineering standards, and shape the future of our payments infrastructure. You will inherit an existing production platform and own its evolution, technical direction, and engineering standards going forward. You will:

Requirements

8 - 12+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience
Proven experience architecting and owning production-grade payment systems or financial infrastructure
Deep expertise in Golang
Strong experience with: PostgreSQL, Redis REST & gRPC API design, OpenAPI Distributed systems and microservices architecture Event-driven systems and message queues
Experience designing: Ledger systems and financial state machines Webhook-driven integrations Highly reliable, idempotent systems
Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure and DevOps: Kubernetes, AWS (EKS, ECR, KMS, SES, SNS) Infrastructure as code (Pulumi preferred) CI/CD systems (ArgoCD)
Experience building and owning observability platforms
Deep understanding of security best practices, including encryption, PII handling, and compliance
Strong experience with testing strategies: Integration testing, E2E testing, and contract testing across services
Demonstrated ability to: Lead architecture decisions Mentor and level up engineers Operate as a technical leader in a fast-moving environment

Nice To Haves

Experience with searchable encryption techniques (deterministic encryption, blind indexing) is strongly preferred

Responsibilities

Architect, design, and evolve Highline’s backend systems, APIs, and distributed services
Own the payments engine, including banking integrations, ledger systems, and money movement orchestration
Define and maintain our public API surface for merchants and partners (REST & gRPC)
Lead design and implementation of state machines, webhook systems, and event-driven architectures
Establish best practices for database design, migrations, and transactional integrity (PostgreSQL, Redis)
Build and standardize code generation workflows (protobuf, SQLBoiler, mockgen)
Own and evolve our observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo)
Design and maintain secure systems, including: PII encryption and searchability (deterministic encryption, blind indexes) Authentication (JWT), authorization (RBAC via Casbin) Key management (KMS) and compliance posture
Lead infrastructure strategy across: Kubernetes (EKS), Pulumi (Go), AWS (ECR, KMS, SES, SNS) CI/CD and deployment workflows (ArgoCD) Secrets management (Vault)
Own production reliability, incident response, and system resilience
Architect event-driven systems and message queue-based async processing for high-volume transactions
Introduce and scale AI-augmented engineering workflows, including sprint planning and developer productivity tooling
Mentor engineers and elevate the team’s technical standards and execution