Sr/Staff Backend Engineer

Senior/Staff Backend Engineer
Payments & Reconciliation

Location: Flexible

About the company

They are building the finance-first All-In-One Operating System for private education across Latin America.

Already trusted by 1,000+ schools and hundreds of thousands of families in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador.

Well-funded with $89M raised, fresh $50M debt facility, and a transformative acquisition that turns them into the full-stack OS for schools.

Mission: give every school perfect clarity, zero financial surprises, and the cash flow to never close its doors.

Role Overview

They need a Senior or Staff Backend Engineer to own the stabilization, redesign, and future evolution of the payments and reconciliation domain — the most mission-critical and gnarly system in the entire platform.

You will sit at the crossroads of financial correctness, data integrity, event-driven architecture, and AI-powered reliability. Your code will move tens of millions of dollars every year with zero tolerance for error.

You’ll eliminate reconciliation nightmares, kill legacy debt, ship real-time financial flows, and weaponize AI to catch anomalies before schools ever see them.

This is a “career-defining” role for someone who gets a rush from making financial systems bulletproof at scale.

What You’ll Lead

1. Modernize & Strengthen the Reconciliation Engine

• Redesign reconciliation workflows to support both real-time and end-of-day processing

• Standardize payments, refunds, adjustments, partial payments, and every edge case known to man

• Produce clean, auditable outputs that make schools and finance teams breathe easy

• Lock down data consistency across processors, internal systems, and reporting

• Ship with AI engineering: automated reconciliation agents, ML anomaly detection, predictive mismatch flags

2. Improve Payment Application & Data Accuracy

• Kill cross-country and cross-processor inconsistencies for good

• Make transaction posting feel instant to parents and schools

• Perfectly handle prepayments, partials, advances, adjustments, surcharges

• Eradicate pending-state bugs, missing webhooks, and silent failures

• Strengthen sync across event streams, APIs, and accounting

• Deploy AI-assisted validation to slash manual reviews and human error

3. Enhance Invoicing & Billing Architecture

• Fix calculation bugs and sync errors in the billing engine

• Nail tax correctness and electronic invoicing for Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador

• Help ship the next-gen invoicing platform across markets

• Build deterministic, testable, boringly-predictable billing flows

• Integrate AI/ML to catch tax anomalies, wrong totals, and recurring mistakes

4. Architecture, Scalability & Technical Debt Reduction

• Drive the full migration to real-time, Kafka-based, event-driven architecture

• Clean up data models, schemas, and service boundaries for 10× growth

• Systematically burn down years of accumulated tech debt

• Expand automated test coverage until critical flows are untouchable

• Write the runbooks, diagrams, and specs that future engineers will thank you for

• Build the infra for AI agents, event-scoring models, and self-healing reconciliation

Required Qualifications

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience

• 3+ years in payments, financial systems, or high-accuracy data workflows

• Strong hands-on expertise in Python, Node.js, or similar backend languages

• Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and data integrity patterns

• Understanding of event-driven architecture, message queues, and asynchronous processing

• Experience integrating with payment providers, banks, or financial APIs

• Strong debugging, root-cause analysis, and system design abilities

• Full professional proficiency in Spanish and English (written & spoken)

Preferred Qualifications

• Experience with Latin American payment methods (OXXO, PSE, SPEI, Banred, etc.)

• Familiarity with electronic invoicing systems and country-specific tax requirements

• Experience with reconciliation platforms (e.g., Simetrik)

• Background in high-throughput, mission-critical systems processing large financial volumes

• Knowledge of accounting, ERP, or financial data models

• Experience contributing to QA automation, observability, or reliability engineering

• Experience working with AI, ML pipelines, or AI-assisted validation systems

Why Join

• Play a foundational role in stabilizing and modernizing one of the most critical product areas

• Architect complex, high-impact systems that power the financial backbone of thousands of schools

• Collaborate with world-class engineering, product, and AI teams

• Directly influence reliability for millions of tuition transactions each year

• Remote-first culture with autonomy, ownership, and career growth

• Opportunity to shape LATAM’s most important education-fintech infrastructure

• Career growth opportunities as product, engineering, and the platform explode

Location: Flexible
Travel: Occasional travel to Mexico City for team onsite sessions

If you live for turning financial chaos into boring perfection and want your code to keep thousands of schools open, send your CV now. ⚡