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.
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
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
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
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
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
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