Principal Backend Engineer

About This Opportunity

We are representing a confidential fintech organization serving small and medium-sized businesses across Europe. Our talent team is seeking a Principal Backend Engineer to join their Latvia-based engineering organization.

This is a strategic technical leadership position where you'll architect and drive the foundational infrastructure powering payments, merchant onboarding, and transaction processing systems at scale. You'll operate at the intersection of engineering excellence and business impact, owning outcomes that directly enable market expansion and product velocity.

Responsibilities

• Own and evolve the architecture behind mission-critical platforms that power high-volume payment processing and merchant experiences across multiple European markets
• Design cloud-native, distributed systems built for resilience, compliance, security, and horizontal scale
• Lead development of event-driven architectures using Kafka, enabling decoupled domains and cross-team collaboration
• Drive adoption of modern backend practices including Java 17/21, Spring Boot 3, Kotlin, and clean architecture principles
• Define and enforce standards for API-first development (REST/gRPC) and domain-driven design
• Set and maintain the bar for system availability, observability, fault tolerance, and performance optimization
• Partner with Product, Data, and executive leadership to translate strategic priorities into scalable technical solutions
• Lead cross-organizational initiatives critical to regulatory compliance, market entry, and business growth
• Mentor senior engineers and influence engineering direction through hands-on contribution and technical design leadership
• Bring clarity and structure to ambiguous technical, operational, and regulatory challenges

What We're Looking For

• 8+ years of experience building and operating distributed, production-grade backend systems
• Proven track record at Senior Staff or Principal level, driving architecture across multiple teams or business domains
• Deep expertise in Java (17+), Spring Boot, and modern JVM ecosystem practices
• Strong hands-on experience with microservices architectures, event-driven systems, and asynchronous processing patterns
• Demonstrated success building systems for high throughput, low latency, and extreme reliability—ideally in fintech, payments, or transaction-heavy environments
• Strong foundation in distributed system design, data structures, concurrency, and performance trade-offs
• Production experience with AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes orchestration
• Proven ability to implement observability strategies, resilience patterns, and mature CI/CD pipelines
• Excellent communication and stakeholder influence skills with ability to align technical and business perspectives
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and leading successfully through ambiguity

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our recruiting team will conduct an initial screening to understand your background and match quality. We'll then coordinate your introduction to our client and guide you through their interview process. Please do not contact the employer directly—all communication flows through our talent team to ensure the best candidate experience.

Benefits & Work Environment

• Flexible working hours with hybrid work policy
• Health insurance coverage
• Physical and mental wellness support
• 25 days annual leave plus bank holidays
• Opportunities to collaborate with international teams when appropriate
• High-quality work equipment in a modern office environment
• Friday office lunch

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on experience and qualifications.

Equal Opportunity

Get A Job.ai is committed to inclusive hiring practices. We welcome candidates of all backgrounds and provide reasonable accommodations throughout our recruitment process.