Backend Software Development Engineer

Who you are

• 6+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a significant portion building backend/distributed systems; prior experience in fintech, payments, on-and-offramp provider, or banking infrastructure strongly preferred
• Strong hands-on expertise in Node.js (TypeScript preferred) for performant, production-grade backend services
• Deep experience with MongoDB — schema design, aggregation pipelines, indexing strategy, and performance tuning at scale
• Proficiency with Redis — caching, distributed locks, rate limiting, and pub/sub patterns
• Proven experience designing and operating microservices architectures, including inter-service communication (REST/gRPC/event-driven via SQS/Kafka,ELK,New relic, Mixpanel), service discovery, and API contract design
• Solid understanding of CI/CD pipelines, with hands-on experience using Jenkins (pipeline-as-code, multi-stage builds, automated test gates)
• Working knowledge of AWS infrastructure — ECS/EKS/Lambda, VPC networking basics, IAM, S3, RDS, CloudWatch; infra-as-code (Terraform/CloudFormation) is a plus
• Strong grasp of distributed systems fundamentals: idempotency, eventual consistency, retries/backoff, circuit breaking, and failure isolation
• Track record of owning a service or domain end-to-end in production, including on-call responsibility
• Excellent written communication — comfortable authoring design docs/RFCs and explaining trade-offs to engineers and non-technical stakeholders (Risk, Ops, external partners)
• Experience with payment rails (ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, SWIFT/wires) or card processing
• Familiarity with banking partner integrations, webhook-driven reconciliation, or ledger/double-entry accounting systems
• Exposure to KYC/AML/fraud tooling
• Experience at a fintech/crypto-native company, payments processor, or Big Tech payments org
• Prior experience operating in a regulated environment (FCA, EMI/PI licensing context), given the UK/EU banking scope of this role

What the job involves

• Transak's Fiat/Payments team builds and operates the rails that move money between traditional banking systems and crypto — ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, wires, virtual accounts, and card rails
• As an SDE 3, you will own critical, high-throughput payment microservices end-to-end: design, build, scale, and operate systems that move real money for users across multiple currencies and jurisdictions, with US,UK/EU regulatory and global banking-partner requirements as a core part of the job
• This is a senior individual-contributor role calibrated against SDE 3 / Senior Engineer, driving architecture decisions, mentoring engineers, and being the go-to owner for a payments domain, while staying hands-on in code daily
• Own payment microservices end-to-end — design, build, deploy, and operate Node.js services (orders, payment, reconciliation, virtual accounts, payout orchestration) handling real-time financial transactions at scale
• Design for correctness and failure: idempotent, retry-safe, reconciliable systems where every transaction is traceable, auditable, and recoverable (partial failures, webhook replays, duplicate detection, distributed state machines)
• Architect for scale and resilience across a distributed microservices architecture; make service-boundary and build-vs-buy decisions; address root causes rather than symptoms
• Drive integrations with banking and payment partners (e.g. banking and card providers / risk providers) — API contracts, webhook handling, sandbox-to-production rollout, and reconciliation logic across multiple rails (ACH, SEPA, Faster Payments, wires)
• Work with Risk, Compliance on KYC, AML, and fraud-control touchpoints in the payment flow
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines (Jenkins) — automated testing, blue/green or canary deployments, and rollback strategies for services that cannot tolerate downtime or data loss
• Operate infrastructure on AWS (ECS/EKS, Lambda, SQS/SNS, RDS, CloudWatch); contribute to infra-as-code, monitoring, alerting, and on-call runbooks for payment-critical systems
• Optimize the data layer: schema design and query performance in MongoDB, caching and rate-limiting strategies with Redis, and safe migration patterns for high-volume transactional collections
• Participate in on-call for payment-critical services, including incident response and postmortems
• Lead technical roadmaps — break down large, ambiguous payments initiatives into shippable milestones; write design docs/RFCs; drive consensus across Engineering, Product, Risk, and Operations
• Mentor and raise the bar — review code and designs, coach mid-level engineers, and help hire and grow the team
• Uphold security and compliance best practices for handling PII/financial data in a regulated, PCI-DSS-adjacent environment

Benefits

• Work/life balance: Non-linear workdays are encouraged at Transak. We support our team members to take ownership of their time and schedule in a way that keeps them balanced in life and able to have the impact they want at work
• Team environment: Transak operates on a hybrid work model, with team members across the world. We have a culture of trust and autonomy, with a focus on communication and collaboration
• Career development: At Transak, we believe that learning is a lifelong pursuit. We provide opportunities for our team members to learn and grow, with a focus on personal and professional development
• Health & Wellness Benefits: At transak, your wellbeing is our priority. Enjoy a comprehensive healthcare package, regular wellness programs, mental health support, flexible working hours, and work-from-home options