Staff Backend Engineer, JVM

This is a fully remote position, open to applicants in Latin America.

📋 Description

• Lead the backend technical strategy, platform architecture, and engineering standards across various teams at Addi.

• Achieve at least one significant business outcome within the scope of this role.

• Re-design high-volume processes related to credit decisioning, onboarding, checkout, payments, repayments, and collections in collaboration with Product, Risk, and Growth teams.

• Take responsibility for platform reliability, scalability, performance, security, cost management, and operability.

• Create and promote the use of service templates, shared libraries, messaging and event standards, as well as CI/CD and release practices.

• Establish and monitor SLOs and error budgets segmented by service tier.

• Conduct root-cause analysis for significant production incidents and implement measures to prevent future occurrences.

• Integrate backend security and quality standards into CI gates.

• Implement coding conventions, skills, specification templates, and CI gates for backend teams.

• Influence technical direction through the use of RFCs and ADRs and encourage their adoption.

• Mentor Senior engineers to progress toward Staff and Tech Lead positions.

• Engage in incident leadership and foster an on-call culture.

• Operate as an individual contributor while providing technical leadership across the organization without any people-management responsibilities.

⛳️ Requirements

• Extensive knowledge of backend and distributed systems at scale.

• Over 18 years of experience in building production software.

• At least 8 years of experience in designing the architecture of large-scale distributed backend systems.

• Proficient in the JVM ecosystem: Java, Kotlin, or Scala, particularly with Spring Boot.

• Deep understanding of SQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ, event-driven design, AWS, and Kubernetes.

• Proven experience in designing architectures that address service boundaries, data consistency, messaging, and zero-downtime deployments.

• A minimum of 4 years in roles such as Staff, Principal, or Software Architect.

• Experience in making technical decisions across multiple teams.

• Capability to write RFCs/ADRs and ensure their adoption.

• Developed a shared standard embraced by four or more teams.

• Background in leading major re-architectures or modernization efforts while ensuring product delivery and availability.

• Familiarity with using agentic CLIs like Claude Code or Factory Droid as a standard coding method.

• Proven experience in establishing AGENTS.md conventions, skills, specification templates, and CI gates for teams or organizations.

• Ability to define SLOs and achieve measurable enhancements in availability, latency, throughput, or infrastructure costs.

• Knowledge of defining security practices around authN/authZ, PII/data protection, OWASP, and PCI compliance.

• Experience with unit, integration, contract, and end-to-end testing methodologies.

• Competence in leading root-cause analysis for intricate production incidents.

• Strong grasp of credit risk, payments, conversion, and cost considerations.

• Skilled in aligning Engineering, Product, Risk, Security, and Data stakeholders.

• Experience managing high-volume payment, credit decisioning, ledger, or onboarding systems within a fintech, bank, or marketplace environment.

• Understanding of concepts such as idempotency, reconciliation, auditability, compliance, and trust in regulated financial products.

• Desirable: Familiarity with API gateways, GraphQL/BFF layers, third-party integrations, OAuth, and token issuing/refresh processes.

• Experience mentoring engineers who have advanced to Senior or Staff roles.

• Involvement in shaping hiring processes, review procedures, or engineering guilds.

• Experience as a calibrated interviewer.

• Conversational proficiency in English is required on the application form.

🏝️ Benefits

• Competitive salary and compensation.

• Company equity options.

• Comprehensive benefits that extend beyond the standard offerings.

• Access to AI Notetaker for interview recording/transcription (for internal evaluation purposes).

• Option to opt out of interview recording without affecting candidacy.