Senior Backend Engineer

Senior Backend Engineer

We are seeking senior backend engineers who are passionate about backend technology, user experience and system reliability. The ideal candidate has helped lead the technical design and implementation of backend features on at least one sizable production application within the past year. A senior backend engineer at Perpay will spend their time writing code, reviewing PRs, mentoring engineers, and helping scope and design new features. We value engineers who demonstrate excitement around solving tough problems and delivering solutions in a fast-paced environment. Much of our team is fullstack, so we look for team members excited to learn new technologies and work across all stacks, even if it’s not something you’ve done before.

What You'll Do

• Design and evolve RESTful APIs used by our frontend and internal systems

• Own data modeling decisions across our relational databases with an eye toward performance and maintainability

• Improve reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our backend systems (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)

• Participate in architectural decisions around service boundaries, asynchronous workflows, and distributed system tradeoffs

• Diagnose and resolve production issues across multiple services

• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD improvements to increase developer velocity and system stability

• Partner with product and stakeholders to translate complex business rules into maintainable backend systems

• What We're Looking For

• 5+ years of experience building web applications at scale in at least one modern language/framework (e.g. Python/Django, Rails, etc.)

• 2+ years of experience leading technical teams and large, complex projects

• Deep understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL), query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema evolution

• Experience operating production systems in a large cloud provider (e.g. AWS)

• Familiarity with containerized environments (Docker) and orchestration systems (Kubernetes)

• Experience with background job systems and message queues (e.g. Celery)

• Working knowledge of caching strategies (e.g. Redis)

• Experience with monitoring/observability tooling (Datadog, CloudWatch)

• Strong understanding of system reliability, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs

• Ability to communicate complex system behavior clearly to non-technical stakeholders

• A solutions-oriented mindset, willing to step outside your primary domain to unblock teammates

• Nice to Have

• Much of our team is fullstack, so we look for team members excited to learn new technologies and work across all stacks, even if it’s not something you’ve done before

• Willingness to host lunch-and-learns or lead technical discussions (e.g. a lunch-and-learn on a new backend technology)

• Familiarity with the broader tech stack in our ecosystem as applicable

• Compensation & Benefits

• NYC-level total cash compensation: base $160k into the $200’s, plus equity and a discretionary cash bonus

• Meaningful compensation and equity

• Premium medical benefits (fully paid base plan, and very reasonable premium for the buy-up option)

• 4% employer 401k match

• Unlimited PTO policy

• Remote weeks around major holidays + extra holiday on weekends like MDW and LDW

• High quality catered lunch by local chefs, 4 days/week

• Gym subsidy

• Paid cell phone + plan

• Student loan repayment program

• Relocation assistance

• Generous team member discounts