Senior Backend Engineer

About Astra

Astra is a high-impact engineering team building mission-critical financial infrastructure. Our fintech platform powers payment processing, fraud detection, and financial compliance for businesses handling 100M+ in weekly transaction volume. We maintain 99.9%+ uptime, process complex cross-border payments, and coordinate with multiple third-party financial services while meeting strict regulatory requirements.

The Role

We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to architect and build complex financial systems that process millions of dollars daily. You'll be one of our core engineers designing cross-domain solutions that coordinate payments, fraud detection, compliance, and user management across our distributed microservices architecture.

This role requires deep systems thinking, technical leadership, and the ability to solve complex engineering challenges that span multiple domains and external integrations.

What You'll Do

Architect Critical Financial Systems: Design and implement payment processing, fraud detection, and compliance systems that handle millions of dollars daily with strict regulatory requirements

Lead Cross-Domain Solutions: Coordinate complex interactions between payments, fraud detection, user management, and compliance systems

Drive Technical Decisions: Lead architecture decisions that impact our entire platform and establish best practices for a growing team

Mentor Engineers: Guide junior engineers and establish coding standards, design patterns, and engineering practices

Optimize System Performance: Improve reliability and performance across our distributed microservices architecture

Collaborate Across Teams: Work closely with product and compliance teams to design systems that meet business and regulatory requirements

What We're Looking For

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience building complex, production systems

Demonstrated systems engineering experience solving complex, cross-domain challenges

Strong foundation in algorithms, data structures, and computer science fundamentals

Experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, and microservices

Ability and willingness to travel up to ~15% annually

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or related field required

Master's degree in Computer Science or Engineering from an accredited university highly preferred

Technical Skills

Backend Development: Python (we use Python 3), strong understanding of web frameworks and APIs

Database Design: Experience with NoSQL and SQL databases

Cloud Infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, or similar cloud platforms

Architecture Patterns: Domain-driven design, clean architecture, CQRS

System Design: Ability to design systems that balance performance, maintainability, and business requirements

Preferred Experience

Financial Systems: Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems

Financial Regulations: Understanding of AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulations

Banking Integrations: Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems

High-Scale Systems: Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes

Third-Party Integrations: Experience coordinating multiple external service integrations

Why This Role Matters

Direct Impact: You'll be a big part of a small engineering team building systems that power a growing fintech platform

Architecture Influence: Lead technical decisions that will scale with our business

Complex Problems: Work on sophisticated challenges that few engineers get to solve

Team Building: Establish engineering practices and culture from the ground up

Financial Innovation: Build systems that enable new financial products and services

What We Offer

Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company

Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements

Small team, big impact - your work directly shapes our platform

Professional growth - lead technical decisions and mentor team members

Modern tech stack - work with cutting-edge cloud technologies

Mission-driven - build systems that power financial innovation

Remote Work and Culture

Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.

How to Apply

We're looking for engineers who are excited by complex systems problems and have the educational background and experience to handle sophisticated challenges. If you're passionate about building mission-critical financial infrastructure and want to have a direct impact on our technical direction, we'd love to hear from you.