Backend Engineer

Professional.me; Washington (District of Columbia); On-site; USD 140,000 - 190,000; Full time

Job summary

A financial infrastructure platform is seeking a Backend Engineer to develop systems that power stablecoin payment infrastructure. The role involves collaborating with product and compliance teams to create reliable solutions for money movement. Candidates should have 3+ years of experience with backend development, proficiency in modern backend languages, and a good understanding of APIs and distributed systems. This position emphasizes delivering scalable systems in a dynamic environment.

Qualifications

• 3+ years of experience in backend system development.
• Proficiency in languages like Go, TypeScript, Node.js, or Python.
• Experience with production features in fast-paced environments.
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS).
• Understanding of security, identity, and risk controls in backend systems.
• Good product instincts and ability to ship reliable features.

Responsibilities

• Architect and implement backend services for stablecoin settlement.
• Build scalable microservices handling high-volume transactions.
• Design secure systems with monitoring and rollback strategies.
• Own deployment pipelines, observability, and operational excellence.
• Translate regulatory and settlement requirements into backend logic.

Skills

Backend languages

Distributed systems

RESTful services

APIs

Data modeling

Microservices

Security practices

PostgreSQL/MySQL

Kafka / Pub/Sub / SQS

Security & identity controls

Product thinking

Tools

Postgres

MySQL

Kafka

SQS

Pub/Sub

Job description

We are sourcing on behalf of HIFI, which is a financial infrastructure platform for the modern internet. Businesses around the world—from fast-growing fintech startups to global financial institutions—use HIFI to move money across stablecoins, fiat rails, and onchain systems through a single programmable interface.

Customers use HIFI to automate payments, orchestrate treasury, power embedded finance products, and launch new global money workflows without needing to build or manage complex banking, blockchain, or compliance infrastructure themselves.

Their mission is to make money programmable by default, and to give developers and businesses the tools to move value instantly, globally, and with software-level control.

About the Team

The HIFI platform team builds the infrastructure, developer experiences, and financial workflows that power stablecoin-native finance at scale. The team designs and maintains the APIs, user-facing tools, and partner integrations that allow customers to create accounts, move money across bank and blockchain rails, and operate compliant global payment systems.

We work across the full lifecycle of modern money movement—from account creation and ledgering, to fiat and stablecoin settlement, to global payouts and onchain connectivity. Our customers span fintech platforms, marketplaces, exchanges, neobanks, payroll providers, and tokenized asset platforms operating across the U.S., Europe, Africa, LatAm, and MENA.

This is an opportunity to help build one of the fastest-growing segments of financial infrastructure and define how money moves on the internet over the next decade.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to help build the critical systems that power HIFI’s global stablecoin payment infrastructure. You’ll work on our APIs, ledgering and settlement services, developer tooling, and the core transaction logic that moves money instantly and securely across bank networks and blockchains.

You’ll collaborate closely with product, compliance, and frontend teams to enable seamless experiences for enterprise developers. This is an opportunity to shape foundational services that support billions in global transaction volume.

This role is based in-person in New York, working closely with our small and fast-moving engineering team.

We value people who:

• Find large challenges exciting and enjoy discovering and defining problems as much as solving them
• Deliver — you may enjoy thoughtful conversations and perfecting designs, but in the end, you care about building reliable solutions that ship
• Communicate clearly and comfortably across teams, asking questions, sharing ideas, and speaking up
• Learn quickly, stay curious, and adapt to new challenges with a growth mindset
• Move fast and stay effective in ambiguous, evolving environments, with a strong sense of urgency to get things done
• Give and receive feedback openly, and collaborate across functions
• Bring passion and experience — for Web3, modern payment solutions, or anything else — and channel it into their work

Responsibilities

Core Infrastructure Engineering

• Architect, implement, and evolve backend services that power real-time bank-to-stablecoin settlement and ledger operations
• Build scalable, resilient microservices and APIs handling high-volume financial transactions
• Develop robust data models, transaction orchestration logic, and state-management systems
• Own services end-to-end: deployment pipelines, observability, and operational excellence

Performance, Reliability & Security

• Design for high-throughput, low-latency execution across distributed environments
• Implement advanced monitoring, automated rollback strategies, and fault-tolerant failover
• Apply best practices in secure system design, encryption, and identity-aware workflows
• Continuously tune compute, storage, and networking to maintain strict SLAs
• Work closely with product, compliance, and cross-functional engineering teams to deliver enterprise-grade capabilities
• Translate financial, regulatory, and settlement requirements into scalable backend logic
• Participate in architectural reviews and shape standards for backend systems

Infrastructure for Global Scale

• Contribute to infrastructure capable of supporting billions in global transaction volume
• Extend corridor capabilities across new chains, bank partners, and payment networks
• Ensure systems adapt seamlessly to increased demand and evolving regulatory environments

Basic Qualifications

• 3+ years building and maintaining production backend systems
• Strong proficiency in modern backend languages (e.g., Go, TypeScript/Node.js, Python, or Java)
• Experience with RESTful services, APIs, distributed systems, and relational databases (Postgres/MySQL)
• Familiarity with event-driven architectures, queues/streaming (Kafka, Pub/Sub, SQS, etc.)
• Understanding of how backend systems interface with security, identity, and risk controls
• Good product instincts. You think about user outcomes, not just implementation details
• Experience delivering production features in fast-paced, high-ownership environments

Preferred Skills & Experience

Interested candidates who meet the basic qualifications should consider applying. The following preferred skills and experience are helpful for this role, but candidates with only some of them are able to be successful on our team. Learning on the job is critical success and part of the excitement of working at HIFI.

• Experience in payments, fintech, banking, liquidity or settlement systems
• Exposure to AML/KYC compliance workflows, identity services, or financial transaction monitoring
• Familiarity with security fundamentals for financial systems, such as encryption, key management, tokenization, and fintech application security best practices
• Prior startup experience or comfort operating in ambiguous, high-growth conditions