Principal Backend Engineer

COMPANY INTRODUCTION Highline offers a smarter way to pay and get paid. Through Highline's intelligent payment network, consumers can make payments directly from their paychecks and access lower-cost credit, easier approvals, and faster loan repayment that minimizes interest. This automated experience ensures on-time bill payment without the hassle of managing balances or overdraft fees.

Billers and lenders benefit from a more reliable, lower-cost payment method and penalty-free payments. We believe everyone should keep more of their money - so we've built Pay by Paycheck. Founded by a team with deep fintech, payments, and payroll-linked product experience, Highline is backed by top-tier VCs including Foundation Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and Jump Capital.

Join us in building the future of payments! Highline is a fully remote company for U.S.-based candidates. We are not currently able to offer visa sponsorship. ---------------------------------------- WHAT YOU’LL BE DOING We are hiring a Principal Backend Engineer to serve as the technical leader and architect for Highline’s platform.

This is a foundational hire - you will own system design, guide engineering standards, and shape the future of our payments infrastructure. You will inherit an existing production platform and own its evolution, technical direction, and engineering standards going forward.

You will: * Architect, design, and evolve Highline’s backend systems, APIs, and distributed services * Own the payments engine, including banking integrations, ledger systems, and money movement orchestration * Define and maintain our public API surface for merchants and partners (REST & gRPC) * Lead design and implementation of state machines, webhook systems, and event-driven architectures * Establish best practices for database design, migrations, and transactional integrity (PostgreSQL, Redis) * Build and standardize code generation workflows (protobuf, SQLBoiler, mockgen) * Own and evolve our observability stack (Prometheus, Grafana, Loki, Mimir, Tempo) * Design and maintain secure systems, including: * PII encryption and searchability (deterministic encryption, blind indexes) * Authentication (JWT), authorization (RBAC via Casbin) * Key management (KMS) and compliance posture * Lead infrastructure strategy across: * Kubernetes (EKS), Pulumi (Go), AWS (ECR, KMS, SES, SNS) * CI/CD and deployment workflows (ArgoCD) * Secrets management (Vault) * Own production reliability, incident response, and system resilience * Architect event-driven systems and message queue-based async processing for high-volume transactions * Introduce and scale AI-augmented engineering workflows, including sprint planning and developer productivity tooling * Mentor engineers and elevate the team’s technical standards and execution ---------------------------------------- WHAT WE ARE LOOKING FOR * 8 - 12+ years of backend or distributed systems engineering experience * Proven experience architecting and owning production-grade payment systems or financial infrastructure * Deep expertise in Golang * Strong experience with: * PostgreSQL, Redis * REST & gRPC API design, OpenAPI * Distributed systems and microservices architecture * Event-driven systems and message queues * Experience designing: * Ledger systems and financial state machines * Webhook-driven integrations * Highly reliable, idempotent systems * Strong knowledge of cloud infrastructure and DevOps: * Kubernetes, AWS (EKS, ECR, KMS, SES, SNS) * Infrastructure as code (Pulumi preferred) * CI/CD systems (ArgoCD) * Experience building and owning observability platforms * Deep understanding of security best practices, including encryption, PII handling, and compliance * Experience with searchable encryption techniques (deterministic encryption, blind indexing) is strongly preferred * Strong experience with testing strategies: * Integration testing, E2E testing, and contract testing across services * Demonstrated ability to: * Lead architecture decisions * Mentor and level up engineers * Operate as a technical leader in a fast-moving environment ---------------------------------------- WHAT SUCCESS LOOKS LIKE * You become the technical authority on Highline’s platform within your first 3 -6 months * You establish scalable, reliable architecture that supports rapid product expansion * You significantly improve system reliability, observability, and incident response * You build a strong engineering culture focused on quality, ownership, and execution * You help hire and mentor the next generation of engineers on the team ---------------------------------------- WHY HIGHLINE * Build and own the core infrastructure powering a next-generation payments network * Join a mission-driven company transforming how people pay bills and access credit * Backed by top-tier VCs: Foundation Capital, Costanoa Ventures, and Jump Capital * Shape the engineering culture and technical direction from the ground up * High autonomy, high ownership, and high impact ---------------------------------------- COMPENSATION AND BENEFITS * Competitive salary + equity (range based on experience and level) * Flexible PTO * Medical, dental, and vision insurance (including dependents) * Mental health and wellness program * Parental leave