Senior Backend Engineer, Payments

About the role

You'll join the Payments team — the system that handles every dollar that flows through StubGuys. We process millions of transactions a year for events ranging from a $5 yoga class in Brooklyn to a $250k cabana at Carnival in Jersey City.

This is a hands-on senior engineering role. You'll own end-to-end systems from API design through database modeling and SRE. You'll work directly with our payment processor partners (Stripe, Adyen) and shape the architecture that 8 other engineers will build on top of.

The first 30 days you'll ramp on our existing payments stack and ship a meaningful improvement to refund processing. By 90 days you'll own a full domain (we're thinking ledger or payouts).

What you'll do

• Design and build the systems that move money — checkout, payouts, refunds, chargebacks, and disputes
• Own the integration with Stripe and Adyen, including failover logic and retry strategies
• Build a robust ledger with double-entry accounting that backs every transaction
• Partner with the Trust & Safety team to fight fraud while keeping legitimate buyers happy
• Shape platform-wide architecture decisions — your code will be the foundation for the next 5 years
• Mentor mid-level engineers on the team and help raise the technical bar
• Be on-call for the payments stack roughly 1 week every 8 weeks (we have a healthy on-call culture)

About you

• 5+ years building production backend systems, ideally with at least 2 years on payments, financial, or ledger systems
• Strong opinions about API design, database schema, and how to model financial state correctly
• Experience with Postgres at scale (10M+ rows in hot tables) — comfortable with explain plans, indexing strategies, and migration patterns
• Worked with at least one major payment processor (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, or similar) at the API level
• Production experience with Go, Python, TypeScript, or Rust (we use Go and TypeScript primarily)
• Cares about the craft — readable code, thoughtful tests, considered tradeoffs
• Excellent written communication — we write a lot of design docs and async updates

Nice to have

• Prior experience at a marketplace or two-sided platform
• Familiarity with PCI compliance, SOC 2, or financial audit processes
• Open-source contributions to financial tooling (e.g. ledger libraries, reconciliation tools)
• Have built a payouts pipeline that handles ACH, wire, or international rails

Benefits & perks

• Health, dental, and vision — 100% covered for you, 80% for dependents (Aetna or Kaiser)
• 401(k) with 4% match, vested immediately
• Unlimited PTO with a 4-week minimum we actively enforce
• $3,000/year learning budget for books, courses, conferences
• $2,500 home office stipend + monthly co-working credit
• Quarterly team offsites in NYC, Lisbon, or Mexico City
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for all parents
• Free StubGuys tickets to any event in our network — go to a show on us

Hiring process

• Application review — we read every application within 5 business days
• 30-min intro call with the hiring manager
• 2-hour technical deep dive — system design + a live coding session on a payments scenario
• Take-home design doc — 4-hour cap, your work is yours to keep
• Final loop — meet 4 future teammates over a half-day (remote or in-person, your call)
• Offer within 48 hours of the final loop