Staff Software Engineer

Staff Backend Engineer – FinTech | New York City Location: New York City (Onsite) Salary: $225,000–$290,000 Base + Equity Employment: Full-time The Opportunity We're partnering with an ambitious, venture-backed FinTech company that's modernising critical infrastructure across financial services. They're building a next-generation technology platform that replaces fragmented, manual processes with scalable, intelligent systems. With a lean engineering team and experienced leadership, they're looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to take ownership of core backend architecture and help scale the platform through its next phase of growth. This is a highly hands-on position offering significant technical ownership, direct influence over engineering decisions and the opportunity to build systems used by demanding institutional clients. Key Responsibilities Design, develop and scale high-performance backend services supporting complex financial workflows. Take ownership of backend architecture, scalability, reliability and performance optimisation. Build and optimise distributed services capable of handling growing transaction volumes and data-intensive workloads. Improve database performance, data access patterns and overall system efficiency. Develop and maintain cloud infrastructure to support secure, resilient production environments. Help establish the technical foundations for AI-driven functionality and automation. Work closely with senior leadership to shape engineering priorities and long-term architecture. Contribute to technical standards, architectural decisions and engineering best practices. What We're Looking For Strong experience designing and building production-grade backend systems. Expertise in Java, Spring Boot or comparable backend technologies. Proven experience scaling PostgreSQL databases and optimising performance. Strong hands-on experience with AWS in production environments. Solid understanding of distributed systems, API design, system reliability and scalability. Ability to take ownership of complex technical challenges from architecture through implementation. Comfortable working in a small, fast-moving engineering team with considerable autonomy. Previous FinTech or financial services experience is advantageous, but not essential. Why Consider This Opportunity? Competitive compensation: $225K–$290K base salary plus equity. Technical ownership: Shape the architecture and scalability of a growing financial technology platform. High-impact engineering: Work on complex backend challenges with meaningful production requirements. Direct influence: Collaborate closely with company leadership and help define engineering direction. AI innovation: Contribute to infrastructure supporting intelligent automation and emerging AI capabilities. Early-stage opportunity: Join a small team where individual contributions have a direct impact on the product and business. Interested? If you're a strong backend engineer who enjoys solving difficult scalability challenges, taking architectural ownership and building high-performance systems, we'd be keen to speak with you. Apply directly or get in touch for a confidential discussion.