Staff Backend Engineer

GiveCard is a company focused on providing financial assistance to those in need. They are seeking a Staff Backend Engineer to take ownership of critical financial systems, design durable infrastructure, and mentor other engineers while ensuring high-quality software delivery.

Responsibilities:

• Own and evolve GiveCard’s most critical backend systems, including our core ledgering, payment orchestration, and task execution infrastructure. These systems must be correct, auditable, and safe in the face of partial failure — and you’ll help define how we build and scale them
• Lead our highest-complexity technical work. When the company needs to ship something foundational — a new financial workflow, a high-stakes integration, or a major refactor of core infrastructure — you’ll be someone we rely on to design it well and see it through
• Raise the technical bar across the backend team by setting best practices for system design, code quality, documentation, and engineering judgment. You’ll be a role model for how we build and ship high-quality software
• Act as a strategic technical partner in shaping GiveCard’s architecture and product direction. Whether it’s a 0-to-1 initiative or a long-term infrastructure investment, you’ll have a strong voice in deciding what we build — and you’ll be hands-on in making it real
• Mentor and up-level other engineers through thoughtful feedback, design reviews, and collaborative problem-solving

Requirements:

• 8+ years of experience architecting, building, shipping, and maintaining backend software at scale
• Experience acting as a technical leader or Staff-level individual contributor, including mentoring engineers, leading technical design discussions, and owning large systems end-to-end
• Strong backend engineering experience in one or more production languages (Go, Java, Ruby, etc), with a willingness to work primarily in Go
• Experience designing and operating complex systems, with strong comfort working with Postgres and relational data models
• Ability to ramp up quickly in a new product ecosystem and contribute meaningfully to large, high-impact projects
• Experience working in startup or high-autonomy environments, and comfort operating effectively amid ambiguity
• Excellent written and verbal communication skills across technical and non-technical audiences
• Ability to give and receive high-quality feedback in technical specs, code reviews, and team discussions
• A strong desire to use your work to make a positive impact in the world
• Experience building financial systems, payment infrastructure, core ledgers, or banking platforms
• Comfort designing systems that require correctness, idempotency, reconciliation, and auditability
• Experience operating backend systems under high load and real-world failure conditions
• Comfort making infrastructure and DevOps decisions using AWS, Terraform, and modern cloud tooling
• Excellent judgment when trading off speed, robustness, and long-term scalability
• The ability to communicate and collaborate effectively across a wide range of seniority levels
• A strong sense of ownership and an impact-driven mindset
• Passion for mentoring and helping other engineers grow
• Curiosity and excitement when working with new technologies or tackling novel, difficult problems