Backend Engineer

ABOUT ASTRA Astra is building mission-critical infrastructure for moving money at scale. Our platform processes billions in annual transaction volume with 99.9%+ uptime, powering real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and complex financial compliance systems. We provide APIs and automation tools that enable businesses to move money programmatically while maintaining strict regulatory requirements. THE ROLE We're looking for a Backend Engineer to build and ship features across the financial systems that move real money every day. You'll join a small team of experienced engineers working on our distributed microservices architecture, taking on features across payments, fraud detection, compliance, and user management from design through production. This role is for an engineer who already delivers independently and is ready to take on broader scope. You'll work on larger, cross-domain problems, get real exposure to architecture decisions, and grow quickly in a domain where correctness and reliability matter. WHAT YOU’LL DO - Own features end to end: Design, build, test, and deploy backend features and services across payments, fraud, compliance, and user management, then run and monitor what you ship - Integrate with financial partners and APIs: Build and maintain integrations with banks, card networks, and other third-party services, handling the edge cases that money movement demands - Contribute to design: Write and review technical designs for your own work, participate in architecture discussions, and learn how our domain-driven, event-driven approach fits together - Improve performance and reliability: Find and fix bottlenecks and failure modes across our microservices, and help raise the quality of our tests and observability - Collaborate across teams: Work closely with product and compliance to turn business and regulatory requirements into working software WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR Required Experience - 3+ years of professional software engineering experience building production backend systems - Track record of delivering features independently, from ambiguous requirements to production, with sound judgment on when to ask for help - Solid foundation in algorithms, data structures, and computer science fundamentals - Working experience with distributed systems, event-driven architectures, or microservices - Ability and willingness to travel up to ~15% annually Education - Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience. We care more about demonstrated ability than credentials. Technical Skills - Backend development: Python 3 and web frameworks and APIs (we use Flask) - Databases: Experience with SQL and NoSQL databases - Cloud infrastructure: Google Cloud Platform, or similar cloud platforms - Architecture patterns: Familiarity with domain-driven design, clean architecture, and CQRS is a plus Preferred Experience - Financial systems: Payment processing, fraud detection, or compliance systems - Financial regulations: Familiarity with AML, KYC, PCI DSS, or similar regulations - Banking integrations: Experience with financial APIs and money movement systems (ACH, card networks) - Third-party integrations: Experience building and maintaining integrations with external services - Scale and reliability: Experience with systems processing high transaction volumes WHY THIS ROLE MATTERS - Direct impact: You'll be a big part of a small engineering team building systems that power a growing fintech platform - Complex problems: Work on sophisticated challenges that few engineers get to solve - Room to grow: A path to broader scope and, over time, technical leadership as the team scales - Financial innovation: Build systems that enable new financial products and services WHAT WE OFFER - Competitive compensation with equity in a growing fintech company. - Remote-first culture with flexible working arrangements - Small team, big impact — your work directly supports Astra’s ability to scale responsibly - Mission-driven — build infrastructure that powers financial innovation while meeting the highest regulatory standards REMOTE WORK AND CULTURE Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team. HOW TO APPLY - We're looking for engineers who are excited by complex systems problems and have the educational background and experience to handle sophisticated challenges. - If you're passionate about building mission-critical financial infrastructure and want to have a direct impact on our technical direction, we'd love to hear from you.