Principal Backend Engineer

What You’ll Do:

Backend Engineering

• Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable backend services that process financial transactions and serve Jeeves customers across 20+ countries.
• Write clean, testable, production-quality code in Go, Python, or Node.js/TypeScript; participate actively in design and code reviews.
• Build and consume RESTful and GraphQL APIs; design inter-service communication using gRPC, message queues, and event-driven architectures.
• Design and optimize relational and non-relational database schemas (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) for correctness, performance, and scale.
• Own backend features end-to-end — from scoping and technical design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration.
• Implement security best practices: authentication, authorization, input validation, and data protection across distributed services.

AI-Assisted Feature Development

• Integrate LLM API calls (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into backend services as product features — such as spend categorization, document parsing, or natural language workflows — ensuring those integrations are reliable, observable, and cost-efficient.
• Build backend pipelines that consume AI-generated outputs safely: validate structured outputs, handle fallback scenarios, and design graceful degradation when AI services are unavailable or return low-confidence results.
• Collaborate with AI and data science teams to integrate model outputs into backend APIs — bridging experimental AI work and production systems.
• Use AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, etc.) fluently as part of your everyday development workflow.

Reliability & Operations

• Instrument services with structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics for full operational visibility.
• Participate in on-call rotation; respond to production incidents and contribute to post-incident reviews.
• Contribute to CI/CD pipeline improvements, testing infrastructure, and deployment practices.

Cross-Regional Collaboration

• Work closely with engineering, product, compliance, and data teams across multiple time zones and regions — communicating in both English and Spanish or Portuguese as the situation requires.
• Contribute to a globally distributed engineering culture through thorough documentation, async design reviews, and thoughtful pull request feedback.
• Bring your regional perspective to product and engineering conversations — our LATAM customers have specific needs, and engineers who understand those markets make our product better.

Requirements:

Minimum Requirements

5+ years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems.

Fluent in English — professional fluency required for daily work with global teams in written and spoken contexts.

Fluent in Spanish or Portuguese — required for collaboration with LATAM teammates, customers, and operational partners.

Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Go, Python, or Node.js/TypeScript.

Experience designing and building RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven backend systems.

Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred): schema design, query optimization, and data modeling.

Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines.

Demonstrated ability to integrate third-party APIs reliably in production — including error handling, retry logic, and observability.

Experience working on globally distributed teams across time zones and regions.

Comfortable using AI tools as part of everyday engineering work — integrating LLM API outputs into backend services and using AI coding assistants fluently.

Preferred Qualifications

Experience in fintech, financial services, payments, or a regulated industry — familiarity with ledger systems, payment rails, or financial compliance (KYC/AML, PCI-DSS) is a strong plus.

Prior experience at a startup or high-growth scale-up, comfortable building in ambiguity without heavy process support.

Experience with multi-currency systems or cross-border payment processing.

Familiarity with message queue systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architecture.

Global work experience — prior roles at companies operating across multiple countries and regulatory environments.

Fluency in both Spanish and Portuguese is a meaningful additional asset.

Originally posted on Himalayas