Founding Senior Backend Engineer
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Role details
Tech stack
Job description
You will be one of the first engineers to own Bantyr’s backend end to end: the API, the data model, the money paths and the infrastructure underneath them. You report to the CTO and work alongside our chief engineer.
Requirements
6+ years building and running backend systems in production, with at least some of that time at an early-stage startup.
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- Deep TypeScript/Node.js experience, or deep experience in another backend language and the will to go deep in ours.
Benefits & conditions
This is a founding seat. You set the standards the next ten engineers inherit: how we design data, test money code, ship migrations safely and respond when production breaks. You will make architecture calls, not just implement them.
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You own:
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- Correctness of money. Revenue splits, payouts, refunds, chargebacks and disputes are right to the cent and safe to retry.
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- Reliability. The API stays fast and up through traffic spikes, deploys and third-party outages.
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- Data. A Postgres schema that grows with the product, with migrations that never take production down.
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- Security and privacy. Auth, permissions, data retention and erasure are built in, not bolted on.
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What you’ll work on
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These are real problems on our roadmap now:
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- Payments and payouts. Harden the pipeline from purchase to creator payout. That covers multi-party revenue splits, scheduled bulk payouts, reconciliation against our payment provider, and money that is idempotent, auditable and never paid twice.
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- Risk and disputes. Chargeback and fraud controls: purchase pauses, card blocks, dispute-rate monitoring, and clawbacks that stay consistent under concurrent writes.
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- Messaging at scale. Real-time conversations between fans, creators and agency chatters, plus push notifications, background jobs and the queues behind them.
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- Agencies and permissions. Multi-tenant access control for agencies, their staff and the creators they manage, including staff acting on a creator’s behalf.
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- Performance. Find and remove slow queries, unbounded reads and tail latency on an autoscaling API.
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- Infrastructure. Containers on AWS, scheduled jobs, observability, and deploys we can roll back with confidence.
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- Trust and safety. Conversation review, legal holds, and privacy erasure that holds up to scrutiny.
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Our stack
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The backend is TypeScript end to end, in a pnpm and Turborepo monorepo shared with our web and mobile apps.
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| Layer | What we use |
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| API | Node.js, Fastify, TypeScript, Zod |
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| Data | PostgreSQL (AWS RDS), Prisma |
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| Clients | React web app, React Native (Expo) iOS app |
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| Testing and CI | Vitest, Playwright, GitHub Actions |
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We use AI coding agents heavily in our workflow. You should be comfortable directing them and reviewing their output critically.
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\n, Strong PostgreSQL skills: schema design, indexing, query plans, locking, and zero-downtime migrations on large tables.
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- Experience building systems that move money, or that otherwise demand exact correctness: idempotency, reconciliation, audit trails.
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- Production ownership: you have been on call, debugged incidents from logs and traces, and fixed the root cause.
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- Judgment about tradeoffs. You know when to ship the simple version and when a shortcut will cost us later.
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- Clear writing. You can explain a design, a risk or an incident to engineers and non-engineers alike.
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Nice to have:
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- Payments, marketplaces or payouts (Stripe Connect, Whop, or similar).
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- AWS (ECS, RDS, EventBridge) and infrastructure as code.
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- Real-time systems, queues and background job design.
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- Multi-tenant authorization and security work.
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- Experience in the creator economy or consumer social products.
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How we work
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- Specs before big changes. Significant features start as a written spec covering the design, the risks, the tests and the rollout.
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- Small PRs, reviewed and tested. Money and auth code gets regression tests that are proven to fail when the guarded behavior breaks.
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- Ship often. We release to production many times a week, behind feature flags where it matters.
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- Own it in production. The person who built it watches it ship, and incidents end with a fix to the root cause.
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- AI-native. Agents write a lot of first drafts here. Engineers own the design, the review and the result.
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