Senior Backend Engineer — First Engineering

We're building a global payments platform — API-first, modeled after Stripe — and hiring our first engineer. The founder built the entire product with AI tooling (Claude Code, Cursor). The platform is live: full merchant API, dashboards, payment orchestration, documentation, CI/CD. Now we need a senior engineer to own production reliability, code quality, and infrastructure decisions as real merchants onboard and real money moves.

This is not a "write CRUD endpoints" role. AI generates the majority of the code. Your job is to review it, catch the edge cases that cause double-charges or race conditions, ensure zero‑downtime migrations, and be the person who knows exactly what to do when payments break at 2 AM.

You’ll inherit a mature codebase and a disciplined engineering process — not a blank slate — and extend both as the team grows.

• Review and harden AI-generated backend code daily — mandatory type‑check gates, no empty catch blocks, no parse
  
  Float on monetary values (everything is integer cents)
• Own production monitoring, alerting, and incident response — Sentry, structured logging (zerolog), on‑call
• Manage database performance — query optimization, migration safety, connection pooling on Neon serverless (dual‑driver: HTTP reads, Web Socket transactions)
• Operate and upgrade Hyperswitch — our open‑source payment orchestrator running on Docker/Railway; you’ll manage the service lifecycle and eventually own its Kubernetes migration
• Make infrastructure decisions — scaling strategy, service boundaries, deployment pipeline improvements
• Ensure payment flow correctness — idempotency, state machine transitions, settlement reconciliation, ledger integrity
• Own secrets and environment management — Doppler sync across Railway, Vercel, and AWS
• Keep engineering documentation current — architecture decisions, runbooks, API contracts live in Outline and must stay in sync with the code

API Server:
Type Script ,
Hono.js v4.6+, Zod validation, @hono/zod-openapi

ORM / Database:
Drizzle ORM
, Postgre

SQL 16 (Neon serverless — dual‑driver: HTTP reads, Web Socket transactions)

API Gateway:
Go 1.22+, Upstash Redis rate limiting, zerolog structured logging

Payment Orchestration:
Hyperswitch (Rust, Docker) with Stripe connector

Workflow Engine:
Temporal Cloud — webhook delivery, payment sagas, retry logic

Frontends: Next.js 15, Tailwind v4, Clerk auth, shadcn/ui

Infrastructure: SST Ion, Vercel, Railway,
AWS ECS Fargate
, Git Hub Actions CI/CD

Edge / Async: Cloudflare Workers, Cloudflare R2, Cloudflare Queues

Secrets: Doppler (synced to Vercel, Railway, AWS Secrets Manager)

Monitoring: Sentry (Node.js + Go)

Cache: Redis (Upstash)

Monorepo: pnpm work spaces, git worktrees

• 5+ years backend engineering
• Type Script — advanced: you can read Hono.js routes, Drizzle schemas, and Zod validators without ramp‑up time
• PostgreSQL — deep: query tuning, transaction isolation levels, zero‑downtime migrations, connection pooling
• Production operations — you’ve been on‑call, triaged multi‑service incidents, built monitoring and alerting from scratch
• Docker — comfortable managing and debugging containerized services
• CI/CD — Git Hub Actions or equivalent; you understand what happens when a deploy breaks
• Monorepo experience — pnpm work spaces or equivalent; you know how to work cleanly across package boundaries
• Comfortable reviewing AI‑generated code — not just "using Copilot," but auditing code that AI wrote from spec to production: catching type gaps, missing error paths, incorrect assumptions about external APIs

• Go — our API gateway is Go; you don’t need to be expert but readable is the bar
• Payments / fintech domain — PSP integrations, idempotency patterns, ledger design, reconciliation
• Temporal or any workflow engine — Temporal Cloud is core to our async flows
• Kubernetes — Hyperswitch migration to ECS/K8s is on the roadmap
• Cloudflare Workers — we’re expanding edge usage
• Hyperswitch or any open‑source payment orchestrator experience

• Degree or certifications
• FAANG pedigree
• Having used this exact stack before — a strong engineer ramps fast

30 days: Get the full platform running locally. Read…