Payments Systems Engineer - Subscriptions & Billing

Speak; San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 240,000; Full time

Job summary

Speak is seeking a dedicated payments engineer to own the reliability of subscriptions. You will own how Speak bills, renews, and grants access for millions of learners, with integrations to Paddle, RevenueCat, Stripe, and more.

You’ll set architecture and standards for payments with high autonomy and report to revenue leaders. You will start embedded with a growth team, then anchor payments within platform, building robust systems, reviewing designs, and leading incident responses.

Qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience with production systems ownership.
• Deep experience in building and operating recurring subscription billing for consumer products.
• Hands-on experience with App Store or Google Play billing, Stripe Billing, or Paddle.
• Strong backend fundamentals in Node.js and TypeScript, with relational databases.
• Track record of improving payment reliability: fewer incidents and cleaner reconciliation.
• Ability to define your own roadmap in an area with no established direction.
• Clear communication with engineering, product, and finance partners.
• Contribute to AI-native development workflows with strong verification loops.
• Able to work in person in San Francisco at least 3 days per week.

Responsibilities

• Own the reliability of Speak’s subscription payments end to end from purchase to renewal, cancellations, refunds, and entitlements.
• Build and maintain integrations with Paddle, RevenueCat, and Stripe and roll out new providers.
• Design for correctness: idempotent webhooks, reconciliation, and safe retries.
• Implement monitoring, alerting, and runbooks to detect payment issues early.
• Lead incident response and postmortems for payments and fix root causes.
• Set standards for how teams modify payments code and review related changes.
• Collaborate with growth, product, finance, and support on pricing and revenue reporting.
• Mentor engineers and raise the reliability bar across the backend.

Skills

Node.js

TypeScript

Billing systems

Subscription billing

Payment provider integrations

Relational databases

Roadmap ownership

Incident response

Cross-team collaboration

Mentoring engineers

Tools

Paddle

RevenueCat

Stripe Billing

App Store / Google Play billing

Job description

Speak is seeking a dedicated payments engineer to own the reliability of subscriptions. You will own how Speak bills, renews, and grants access for millions of learners, with integrations to Paddle, RevenueCat, Stripe, and more.

You’ll set architecture and standards for payments with high autonomy and report to revenue leaders. You will start embedded with a growth team, then anchor payments within platform, building robust systems, reviewing designs, and leading incident responses.