Senior Backend Engineer — Payments

About this role

Arcline Systems processes over $40M per month through Stripe and a custom internal ledger, and the volume is growing. We're looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to own and evolve the payments integration layer — the infrastructure that makes sure money moves correctly, every time. You'll work on a small, collaborative team (6 backend, 2 frontend, 1 DevOps) that writes design docs, reviews each other's RFCs, and takes ownership seriously without taking itself too seriously. We're fully remote, but we fly everyone to Portland once a quarter to eat too much food and whiteboard things that probably could've been Slack messages. What You'll Do Own the payments integration layer end-to-end: Stripe, internal ledger, webhook processing, reconciliation Design and build reliable, idempotent transaction flows that handle edge cases gracefully Write and maintain infrastructure-as-code (Terraform) for payment services running on AWS (Lambda, SQS, RDS/Postgres) Participate in on-call rotation (~1 page/month — it's not bad, but payments can break at 2 AM) Contribute to our RFC and design doc culture — we think through problems on paper before writing code Help the team stay SOC 2 compliant without losing our minds What We're Looking For 5+ years building backend systems in Python (Django, FastAPI, or Flask — we use Django but we're flexible) Real experience with payment systems or fintech infrastructure — not "I used Stripe once," but understanding idempotency, retry logic, debit/credit flows, webhook reconciliation Strong AWS chops: Lambda, SQS, RDS, and ideally some Terraform experience Comfort working on-call for payment-critical systems Low ego, high communication. We write a lot of design docs and we talk through trade-offs as a team Nice to Have Experience with event-driven architecture (Kafka or Kinesis) Familiarity with SOC 2 compliance in a production environment Experience mentoring other engineers Benefits $165K–$195K base + equity Fully remote with paid quarterly onsites in Portland 401(k) with match Unlimited PTO — and we actually track it so people use it Health, dental, vision