Staff Engineer (Backend) - Money

Ajaib

2d • Remote

About The Position

As a Staff Engineer (Backend) in the Money team, you set the technical direction for systems that hold and move customers’ money across several teams, including the ledger and account platform, transfers and payments, bank integrations, reconciliation, and end-of-day processing. You solve difficult problems involving correctness, consistency, and reliability, and strengthen the engineers around you while remaining hands-on where it matters most.

You define architecture for ledger, account, and payment systems; lead the design of fault-tolerant, consistent, and secure services; and establish standards for correct money flows. You also guide integrations with banks and payment networks, reconciliation and settlement processes, fraud and risk controls, and preparation for peak loads and failures. The role involves cross-functional partnership, technical leadership, incident investigation, engineering standards, and implementation of critical components.

Requirements

• Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science, or equivalent practical experience.
• At least 8 years of professional software engineering experience.
• Proven record of designing and operating large-scale distributed systems handling money or other critical transactions, and leading technical work across teams.
• High proficiency in Java, Go, or another modern backend language.
• Strong expertise in microservices, event-driven architectures, distributed transactions, reliability engineering, observability, and performance optimization.
• Strong working knowledge of ledgers, payment networks, bank integrations, reconciliation, and batch processing, or equivalent depth in large payment or e-wallet systems.
• Deep practical experience with Kafka, Redis, and relational databases, including transactions, locking, query tuning, and data consistency.
• Experience designing and operating applications on cloud platforms such as GCP or AWS.
• Background in banking, payments, e-wallets, or another high-scale, regulated financial environment.
• Strong communication skills and ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority.

Responsibilities

• Define technical direction and architecture for ledger, account, and payment systems spanning several teams.
• Lead the design of fault-tolerant, consistent, and secure services, and review critical designs from other teams.
• Lead ledger architecture, including double-entry modeling, balance computation at scale, holds, reversals, and complete audit trails.
• Set standards for correctness in money flows, including idempotency, clear transaction states, distributed transaction patterns, and safe handling of unknown results.
• Design a platform for connecting to banks and payment networks, including routing, failover, success-rate monitoring, and cut-off handling.
• Design reconciliation, settlement, and end-of-day processing to quickly find differences and address their root causes.
• Design fraud and risk controls for real-time money flows while avoiding unnecessary impact on normal customers.
• Plan for peak loads and failure scenarios, and drive load testing, capacity planning, and disaster recovery.
• Identify technical risks, evaluate trade-offs, and drive decisions that align with business and regulatory needs.
• Lead investigations and root-cause analysis for complex production incidents, and drive lasting improvements.
• Set and promote engineering standards for reliability, observability, security, and performance.
• Partner with Engineering Managers, Product, Finance, Risk, and Compliance on cross-team initiatives.
• Mentor Senior Engineers and help develop technical leadership across the team.
• Remain hands-on in implementing critical components and solving complex problems.

Benefits

• Performance bonus.
• Comprehensive private health insurance.
• Paid time off.
• Company-sponsored training, courses, and professional certifications.
• Hybrid work arrangement with flexibility to work remotely and from the office.
• Career growth through working with experienced leaders and taking on meaningful ownership.
• Exclusive discounts, partnerships, and lifestyle perks.
• Collaborative, high-ownership culture with cross-functional teams.

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior