Principal Backend Engineer
Job in
Washington, District of Columbia, 20001, USA
Listed on 2026-06-27
Listing for:
Highline
Full Time
position Listed on 2026-06-27
Job specializations:
-
Software Development
Backend Developer, Software Architect, Cloud Engineer - Software, DevOps
Job Description & How to Apply Below
Principal Backend Engineer
We are hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to serve as the technical leader and architect for Highline's platform. This is a foundational hire - you will own system design, guide engineering standards, and shape the future of our payments infrastructure. You will inherit an existing production platform and own its evolution, technical direction, and engineering standards going forward.
You will:
- Architect, design, and evolve Highline's backend systems, APIs, and distributed services
- Own the payments engine, including banking integrations, ledger systems, and money movement orchestration
- Define and maintain our public API surface for merchants and partners (REST & gRPC)
- Lead design and implementation of state machines, webhook systems, and event-driven architectures
- Establish best practices for database design, migrations, and transactional integrity (PostgreSQL, Redis)
- Build and standardize code generation workflows (protobuf, SQLBoiler, mockgen)
- Own and evolve our observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo)
- Design and maintain secure systems, including:
- PII encryption and searchability (deterministic encryption, blind indexes)
- Authentication (JWT), authorization (RBAC via Casbin)
- Key management (KMS) and compliance posture
- Lead infrastructure strategy across:
- Kubernetes (EKS), Pulumi (Go), AWS (ECR, KMS, SES, SNS)
- CI/CD and deployment workflows (ArgoCD)
- Secrets management (Vault)
- Own production reliability, incident response, and system resilience
- Architect event-driven systems and message queue-based async processing for high-volume transactions
- Introduce and scale AI-augmented engineering workflows, including sprint planning and developer productivity tooling
- Mentor engineers and elevate the team's technical standards and execution
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