Senior Backend Lead: Payments & Fraud, AI-Driven

Rainfall Ventures; Polska; On-site; PLN 180,000 - 300,000; Full time

Job summary

Papaya, a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, is seeking a seasoned engineering leader to head Typhoon, the Payments & Fraud team in our Core R&D group in Warsaw. You will raise the bar on architecture, scale, and delivery, grow engineers into technical leaders, and drive AI-native adoption across design, code reviews, and incident response.

Fluency in English and a track record of real-time systems is essential.

Qualifications

• 3+ years leading backend engineering teams, including hiring.
• 8+ years as a software engineer with backend focus.
• Experience designing and operating real-time, high-scale distributed systems.
• Ownership of production systems where correctness, security, and uptime are non-negotiable.
• Strong hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS preferred).
• Excellent communication skills in English.
• Hands-on use of AI tools and agents in production work, with leadership of AI tooling adoption.

Responsibilities

• Lead, grow, and hire a team of senior backend engineers.
• Set the technical vision and roadmap for the payments and fraud-prevention platform, with Product, BI, and Client (Unity).
• Drive architecture decisions that carry the platform through growth.
• Own business-critical systems end-to-end, with reliability, security, and auditability.
• Stay hands-on in design, code review, and critical code paths.
• Lead incident response and post-mortems to strengthen the system.
• Make the team AI-native: build AI tools and agents into daily work and measure impact.
• Explore and apply AI/ML to fraud detection, risk scoring, and payment operations.

Skills

Team leadership

Backend engineering

AWS cloud

Kubernetes

Node.js

TypeScript

MySQL

Redis

Data modeling

AI tooling adoption

English communication

Education

B.Sc. in Computer Science or Software Engineering

Tools

AWS

Kubernetes

Node.js

TypeScript

Redis

MySQL

Job description

Papaya, a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, is seeking a seasoned engineering leader to head Typhoon, the Payments & Fraud team in our Core R&D group in Warsaw. You will raise the bar on architecture, scale, and delivery, grow engineers into technical leaders, and drive AI-native adoption across design, code reviews, and incident response.

Fluency in English and a track record of real-time systems is essential.