Founding Senior Backend Engineer

The role: You will be one of the first engineers to own Bantyr's backend end to end: the API, the data model, the money paths and the infrastructure underneath them. You report to the CTO and work alongside our chief engineer. This is a founding seat. You set the standards the next ten engineers inherit: how we design data, test money code, ship migrations safely and respond when production breaks. You will make architecture calls, not just implement them. You own:- Correctness of money. Revenue splits, payouts, refunds, chargebacks and disputes are right to the cent and safe to retry.- Reliability. The API stays fast and up through traffic spikes, deploys and third-party outages.- Data. A Postgres schema that grows with the product, with migrations that never take production down.- Security and privacy. Auth, permissions, data retention and erasure are built in, not bolted on. What you'll work onThese are real problems on our roadmap now:- Payments and payouts. Harden the pipeline from purchase to creator payout. That covers multi-party revenue splits, scheduled bulk payouts, reconciliation against our payment provider, and money that is idempotent, auditable and never paid twice.- Risk and disputes. Chargeback and fraud controls: purchase pauses, card blocks, dispute-rate monitoring, and clawbacks that stay consistent under concurrent writes.- Messaging at scale. Real-time conversations between fans, creators and agency chatters, plus push notifications, background jobs and the queues behind them.- Agencies and permissions. Multi-tenant access control for agencies, their staff and the creators they manage, including staff acting on a creator's behalf.- Performance. Find and remove slow queries, unbounded reads and tail latency on an autoscaling API.- Infrastructure. Containers on AWS, scheduled jobs, observability, and deploys we can roll back with confidence.- Trust and safety. Conversation review, legal holds, and privacy erasure that holds up to scrutiny. Our stack The backend is TypeScript end to end, in a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo shared with our web and mobile apps.| Layer | What we use || API | Node.js, Fastify, TypeScript, Zod || Data | PostgreSQL (AWS RDS), Prisma || Clients | React web app, React Native (Expo) iOS app || Testing and CI | Vitest, Playwright, GitHub Actions |We use AI coding agents heavily in our workflow. You should be comfortable directing them and reviewing their output critically.

What we're looking for: You have:- 6+ years building and running backend systems in production, with at least some of that time at an early-stage startup.- Deep TypeScript/Node.js experience, or deep experience in another backend language and the will to go deep in ours.- Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema design, indexing, query plans, locking, and zero-downtime migrations on large tables.- Experience building systems that move money, or that otherwise demand exact correctness: idempotency, reconciliation, audit trails.- Production ownership: you have been on call, debugged incidents from logs and traces, and fixed the root cause.- Judgment about tradeoffs. You know when to ship the simple version and when a shortcut will cost us later.- Clear writing. You can explain a design, a risk or an incident to engineers and non-engineers alike.

Nice to have: Payments, marketplaces or payouts (Stripe Connect, Whop, or similar).- AWS (ECS, RDS, EventBridge) and infrastructure as code.- Real-time systems, queues and background job design.- Multi-tenant authorization and security work.- Experience in the creator economy or consumer social products. How we work- Specs before big changes. Significant features start as a written spec covering the design, the risks, the tests and the rollout.- Small PRs, reviewed and tested. Money and auth code gets regression tests that are proven to fail when the guarded behavior breaks.- Ship often. We release to production many times a week, behind feature flags where it matters.- Own it in production. The person who built it watches it ship, and incidents end with a fix to the root cause.- AI-native. Agents write a lot of first drafts here. Engineers own the design, the review and the result. Compensation and logistics| Item | Details || Salary | 150,000 to 220,000 USD per year, depending on what you bring to the table || Location | Remote. Work from anywhere || Employment type | Full-time. We are open to starting part-time while we both assess fit || Time off | Flexible time off || Equipment | A new Mac || Benefits | None yet, since we are an early-stage startup. We plan to add RSUs and health insurance within the next 6 months |How to apply Send your resume or LinkedIn to [Kevin to fill: application email or link]. Include a few sentences about the hardest production problem you have owned: what broke, how you found it, and what you changed so it would not happen again. Our process:1. Intro call (30 min) with the CTO about your background and what you want next.2. Technical deep dive (60 min) on a system you built: the design, the tradeoffs, what failed in production.3. Practical exercise (about 2 hours): a realistic backend problem, such as a money-movement or data-modeling task. AI tools are allowed, and we will discuss how you used them.4. Team conversations with our chief engineer and a founder.5. References and offer. We aim to move from first call to decision within two weeks.