Staff 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/Staff 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 Staff Backend Engineer Requirements - 8+ years of software engineering experience building complex, production systems - 3+ years of technical leadership experience (mentoring, architecture decisions, cross-team coordination) - 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 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 te