Astra
Staff Backend Engineer
1mo ago
210000 –260000 USD / yearUSALeadRemotemicroservicespayment processingfraud detectionfinancial compliancedistributed systems
Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to architect and build complex financial systems handling high-volume payments and compliance.
Responsibilities
- We're looking for a Senior/Staff Backend Engineer to architect and build complex financial systems that process millions of dollars daily. You'll be one of our core engineers designing cross-domain solutions that coordinate payments, fraud detection, compliance, and user management across our distributed microservices architecture.
- This role requires deep systems thinking, technical leadership, and the ability to solve complex engineering challenges that span multiple domains and external integrations.
- Architect Critical Financial Systems: Design and implement payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems that handle millions of dollars daily with strict regulatory requirements
- Lead Cross-Domain Solutions: Coordinate complex interactions between payments, fraud detection, user management, and compliance systems
- Drive Technical Decisions: Lead architecture decisions that impact our entire platform and establish best practices for a growing team
- Mentor Engineers: Guide junior engineers and establish coding standards, design patterns, and engineering practices
- Optimize System Performance: Improve reliability and performance across our distributed microservices architecture
- Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with product and compliance teams to design systems that meet business and regulatory requirements
Requirements
- 8+ years of software engineering experience building complex, production systems
- 3+ years of technical leadership experience (mentoring, architecture decisions, cross-team coordination)
- Demonstrated systems engineering experience solving complex, cross-domain challenges
- Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and computer science fundamentals
- Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices
Nice to have
- Financial Systems: Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems
- Financial Regulations: Understanding of AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulations
- Banking Integrations: Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems
- High-Scale Systems: Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes
- Third-Party Integrations: Experience coordinating multiple external service integrations
Conditions
- Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company
- Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements
- Small team, big impact - your work directly shapes our platform
- Professional growth - lead technical decisions and mentor team members
- Modern tech stack - work with cutting-edge cloud technologies
- Mission-driven - build systems that power financial innovation
How to apply
- We're looking for engineers who are excited by complex systems problems and have the educational background and experience to handle sophisticated challenges. If you're passionate about building mission-critical financial infrastructure and want to have a direct impact on our technical direction, we'd love to hear from you.
Other
- Astra is a high-impact engineering team building mission-critical financial infrastructure. Our fintech platform powers payment processing, fraud detection, and financial compliance for businesses handling 100M+ in weekly transaction volume. We maintain 99.9%+ uptime, process complex cross-border payments, and coordinate with multiple third-party financial services while meeting strict regulatory requirements.
- Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field required
- Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering from an accredited university highly preferred
- Backend Development: Python (we use Python 3), strong understanding of web frameworks and APIs
- Database Design: Experience with NoSQL and SQL databases
- Cloud Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, or similar cloud platforms
- Architecture Patterns: Domain-driven design, clean architecture, CQRS
- System Design: Ability to design systems that balance performance, maintainability, and business requirements
- Direct Impact: You'll be a big part of a small engineering team building systems that power a growing fintech platform
- Architecture Influence: Lead technical decisions that will scale with our business
- Complex Problems: Work on sophisticated challenges that few engineers get to solve
- Team Building: Establish engineering practices and culture from the ground up
- Financial Innovation: Build systems that enable new financial products and services
- Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.