Backend Engineer

About the role

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