We're building a global payments platform — API-first, modeled after Stripe — and hiring our first engineer. The founder built the entire product with AI tooling (Claude Code, Cursor). The platform is live: full merchant API, dashboards, payment orchestration, documentation, CI/CD. Now we need a senior engineer to own production reliability, code quality, and infrastructure decisions as real merchants onboard and real money moves.
This is not a "write CRUD endpoints" role. AI generates the majority of the code. Your job is to review it, catch the edge cases that cause double-charges or race conditions, ensure zero-downtime migrations, and be the person who knows exactly what to do when payments break at 2 AM.
You'll inherit a mature codebase and a disciplined engineering process — not a blank slate — and extend both as the team grows.
What You'll Do
Review and harden AI-generated backend code daily — mandatory type-check gates, no empty catch blocks, no parseFloat on monetary values (everything is integer cents)
Own production monitoring, alerting, and incident response — Sentry, structured logging (zerolog), on-call
Operate and upgrade Hyperswitch — our open-source payment orchestrator running on Docker/Railway; you'll manage the service lifecycle and eventually own its Kubernetes migration
Make infrastructure decisions — scaling strategy, service boundaries, deployment pipeline improvements
Production operations — you've been on-call, triaged multi-service incidents, built monitoring and alerting from scratch
Docker — comfortable managing and debugging containerized services
CI/CD — GitHub Actions or equivalent; you understand what happens when a deploy breaks
Monorepo experience — pnpm workspaces or equivalent; you know how to work cleanly across package boundaries
Comfortable reviewing AI-generated code — not just "using Copilot," but auditing code that AI wrote from spec to production: catching type gaps, missing error paths, incorrect assumptions about external APIs
Strong Bonus
Go — our API gateway is Go; you don't need to be expert but readable is the bar
Temporal or any workflow engine — Temporal Cloud is core to our async flows
Kubernetes — Hyperswitch migration to ECS/K8s is on the roadmap
Cloudflare Workers — we're expanding edge usage
Hyperswitch or any open-source payment orchestrator experience
Not Required
Degree or certifications
FAANG pedigree
Having used this exact stack before — a strong engineer ramps fast
Your First 30 / 60 / 90 Days
30 days: Get the full platform running locally. Read the codebase end to end. Shadow three production deploys. Own your first incident (or near-miss). Identify the top three reliability gaps.
60 days: Own production monitoring end to end — alerting, dashboards, runbooks. Perform your first schema migration under load. Improve the CI pipeline in at least one meaningful way.
90 days: You're the person who reviews every significant backend change before it ships. You've made at least one infrastructure decision that will outlast your tenure. You're setting the engineering standards the next hire will follow.
What Makes This Role Different
You're engineer #1, not engineer #50. There's no existing engineering culture to inherit — you build it. That means your judgment on code quality, incident response, and system design becomes the default.
The AI workflow is real, not a talking point. Claude Code runs with mandatory checkpoints: type-check gates before every commit, PROGRESS.md files tracking every agent's work, multi-agent sessions across git worktrees. You'll be the human in that loop — reviewing diffs that span six files written in parallel by subagents, catching the edge cases the model didn't see.
The work is consequential. Payments are unforgiving. A bug in an idempotency key means a merchant gets charged twice. A botched migration means downtime. You'll write the runbooks, own the alerts, and be accountable when things break — because you're also the one who prevented most of it.
No process overhead. No sprint ceremonies, no tickets, no design-by-committee. You see a problem, you fix it. That's liberating and demanding in equal measure.
Equity that means something. First engineering hire at an early-stage payments company. Generous allocation, standard vesting, priced at the ground floor.
What We're Not
We won't pretend this is easy. You're joining a two-person team (founder + you) with real merchants and real money on the platform. There's no senior engineer above you to escalate to. If you need extensive mentorship, a large team to distribute risk across, or a mature engineering org to learn from, this isn't the right fit yet.
If you want maximum ownership, minimum bureaucracy, and to build something that ships — this is it.
