Senior Backend Engineer

Who you are

• 5+ years of experience in backend development, including meaningful time operating what you built in production
• Formal SRE practice experience — error budget policies, capacity models, production readiness reviews, chaos or fault-injection testing
• Strong, demonstrated experience in GoLang and/or Node.js with a willingness to learn
• Strong experience in designing, developing, and maintaining scalable backend systems
• Experience with building and optimizing APIs, real-time data processing systems, and microservices architectures
• Hands-on experience running production services on containerization and orchestration technologies such as Docker and Kubernetes
• Experience with infrastructure-as-code tools like Terraform or AWS CloudFormation
• Working fluency with observability tooling such as Datadog or comparable monitoring, logging, and tracing platforms — including instrumenting services and building useful dashboards and alerts
• Experience participating in an on-call rotation: triaging live incidents, mitigating impact, and writing up what happened afterward
• Strong knowledge of SQL and experience with databases like DynamoDB, Redis, or Elasticsearch
• Proficiency with general software engineering tools: Git, IDEs, shell scripting, CI/CD
• Proficient in English for clear communication in a global, remote team
• Ability to work independently on tasks while effectively collaborating as a team member
• A strong desire to mentor and grow junior team members
• BS/MS in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent work experience
• Practical experience with analytical storage systems like ClickHouse, Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks
• Experience with performance profiling and cost optimization of high-throughput cloud workloads
• Experience working with large open-source projects to address the needs of a wide variety of stakeholders, and demonstrated ability to work and communicate asynchronously across a world-wide team
• Demonstrated experience with both Node.js and Go in a backend context
• Excellent understanding of Internet security & privacy mechanisms

What the job involves

• We are seeking an experienced Senior Software Engineer to help build and operate the end-to-end fraud detection systems behind our Core APIs
• Your primary responsibility will be building highly performant backend systems and keeping them reliable at scale
• This is a hybrid backend/SRE role: you'll write the services and you'll own how they behave in production
• This role requires strong experience in backend software development, particularly API development and scaling existing systems in both Go and Node
• Js, paired with a genuine interest in reliability engineering
• You'll design and implement scalable, high-performance backend systems, maintain their SLOs, and take ownership of features from concept through deployment and steady-state operation
• A key aspect of this role involves a deep understanding of scaling and operating distributed systems, allowing us to multiply our capacity safely and efficiently as our user base continues to grow rapidly
• Design, develop, and optimize backend systems for real-time data processing and web services, with reliability, latency, and cost as first-class design constraints
• Define and own SLIs and SLOs for Core API services, and use error budgets to make concrete tradeoffs between shipping velocity and stability
• Build and maintain the observability that makes these systems debuggable: Meaningful metrics, structured logging, distributed tracing, and alerts that fire on user-visible symptoms rather than noise
• Participate in a shared on-call rotation, act as an effective responder during incidents, and lead blameless postmortems. The schedule will be communicated in advance, and we strive to balance coverage equitably while minimizing off-hours disruptions
• Drive down operational toil by automating recurring manual work, and close the loop on incident action items so the same failure doesn't happen twice
• Conduct capacity planning, load testing, and performance tuning to ensure the platform scales ahead of demand
• Conduct deep dives into problematic features, researching and analyzing their behavior to understand root causes and identify potential solutions. Develop hypotheses, run experiments, analyze results, and translate findings into actionable engineering improvements
• Work with cross-functional teams to integrate backend components with other services, ensuring performance and scalability
• Foster a data-driven, reliability-minded culture by sharing engineering best practices and collaborating on cross-functional projects
• Mentor other developers, helping all team members grow in our mission, values, and abilities

Benefits

• Competitive salary: We offer competitive salaries and equity because we believe all employees should own a part of Fingerprint.
• Flexible Time Off: To prioritize work-life balance, we even have a minimum vacation days target to encourage everyone gets the rest they need.
• Remote-first: We work asynchronously and respect time-zone differences. Choose where and when you do your work best.
• Tech: We hook you up with a MacBook so you can do your best work (you get to keep it after 4 years).
• Culture: We're a small team with a lean hierarchy where you can make a real impact in shaping the company culture. Come grow with us!
• Fun: We meet up as a company once a year (We went to Mexico City in 2023!) and teams meet up in smaller groups throughout the year.
• Grow With Us: We want you to grow with us, so we offer a $600 yearly budget that you can spend to learn new stuff.
• Personal Development: We give you the freedom to grow and experiment. Work on open-source projects and try new things and ideas.