Senior Software Engineer, Backend

About Us:

With over 500,000 customers who have utilized more than $1 billion in spending power, we are at a pivotal moment. We are scaling our operations, building new offerings, and deepening our impact. We are looking for teammates eager to join us on this journey.

Products we’ve built to make an impact:

Our team thrives on in-person collaboration, operating from our unique center-city Philadelphia office. This comfortable "home away from home" space offers river views and fosters rapid product development, strong relationships, and career growth. The energy from achieving big wins is palpable here.

While we primarily work in the office, we offer sensible flexibility for personal needs, such as sick children or urgent errands, and coordinate official remote weeks around major holidays. If you are passionate about a meaningful mission, collaboration, equity, and generous perks, Perpay is the best place to be in Philadelphia right now.

About the Role:

We are looking for senior backend engineers passionate about backend technology, excellent user experience and system reliability. The ideal candidate has helped lead the technical design and implementation of backend features on at least one sizable production application within the past year. A senior backend engineer at Perpay will spend their time writing code, reviewing PRs, mentoring engineers, and helping scope & design new features.

We are looking for people who can bring backend technical expertise to push our technology forward — whether it’s hosting a lunch-and-learn on a new backend technology or directing a large refactor. We value engineers who demonstrate excitement around solving tough problems and delivering solutions in a fast-paced environment.

Much of our team is fullstack, so we look for team members excited to learn new technologies and work across all stacks, even if it’s not something you’ve done before! Our tech stack: Javascript, React, React Native, Redux, Python, Django, Flask, Kubernetes, AWS, Docker and more.

Responsibilities:

• Design and evolve RESTful APIs used by our frontend and internal systems
• Own data modeling decisions across our relational databases with an eye toward performance and maintainability
• Improve reliability, observability, and operational excellence of our backend systems (metrics, logging, tracing, alerting)
• Participate in architectural decisions around service boundaries, asynchronous workflows, and distributed system tradeoffs
• Diagnose and resolve production issues across multiple services
• Contribute to infrastructure-as-code and CI/CD improvements to increase developer velocity and system stability
• Partner with product and stakeholders to translate complex business rules into maintainable backend systems

What You’ll Bring

• 5+ years of experience building web applications at scale in at least one modern language / framework (e.g. Python/Django, Rails, etc.)
• 2+ years of experience leading technical teams and large, complex projects
• Deep understanding of relational databases (e.g., Postgres), query optimization, indexing strategies, and schema evolution
• Experience operating production systems in a large cloud provider (e.g. AWS)Familiarity with containerized environments (Docker) and orchestration systems (Kubernetes)
• Experience with background job systems and message queues (e.g. Celery)
• Working knowledge of caching strategies (e.g. Redis)
• Experience with monitoring/observability tooling (e.g. Datadog, CloudWatch)
• Strong understanding of system reliability, failure modes, and operational tradeoffs
• Ability to communicate complex system behavior clearly to non-technical stakeholders
• A solutions-oriented mindset, willing to step outside your primary domain to unblock teammates and ensure successful delivery

NYC-level total cash-comp (base $160k into the $200’s, plus equity and a discretionary cash bonus)

We know not everybody checks all the boxes, so if you’re interested, please apply because you could be just what we’re looking for!

What We’ll Bring to Full-time Team Members:

• Meaningful compensation and equity
• Premium medical benefits (fully paid base plan, and very reasonable premium for the buy-up option)
• 5% employer 401k match
• Unlimited PTO policy
• ​​Remote weeks around major holidays + extra holiday on weekends like MDW and LDW
• High quality catered lunch by local chefs, 4 days / week
• Gym subsidy
• Paid cell phone + plan
• Student loan repayment match program
• Family savings match program
• Relocation assistance
• Generous team member discounts

This is not a remote opportunity; it is 100% onsite (#LI-Onsite) (#LI-TH1) (#LI-AK1)