Backend Engineer - Card & Transaction Platform

ABOUT THE ROLE

The Card & Transaction Platform team keeps Pliant's most critical backend flows running: card issuance and transaction processing. The team holds itself to a high availability bar, getting there through solid engineering and a no-blame culture rather than heroics. With a fast-growing customer base and rising request volumes, this role is for an experienced backend engineer who anticipates problems and prevents them, building and shipping new product features on Java/Spring Boot microservices just as much as keeping them fast and reliable.

WHAT YOU'LL DO

• Define, measure, and improve SLOs/SLAs and error budgets for critical services.

• Help evolve and scale the platform to keep pace with a growing customer base and rising request volumes.

• Stay ahead of problems: spot weak points, risky patterns, and capacity limits early and address them before they affect customers.

• Share in a fair, well-compensated 24/7 on-call rotation and help lead incident response, from mitigation to blameless postmortem and follow-through.

• Own observability across dashboards, alerting, tracing, and logging (we use Datadog), and drive performance improvements across latency-sensitive paths.

• Design, build, and ship new product features end-to-end across Java/Spring Boot microservices, from API design through to rollout.

• Balance feature delivery with continuous improvement, collaborating with product and other engineering teams to turn requirements into reliable, well-tested services.

WHAT YOU'LL BRING

• 5+ years of experience building and operating modern distributed backend services on a Java/Spring Boot stack, with AWS cloud services, Kafka, and PostgreSQL.

• A track record with high-availability systems where reliability genuinely matters, including experience scaling systems under growing load.

• Fluency with a modern observability stack and solid SLO/SLA thinking.

• A proactive, ownership mindset: you look for the next problem before it happens rather than waiting for the alert.

• Comfortable owning features end-to-end, from design and implementation through testing and delivery.

• Hands-on, proven experience using AI effectively as an engineering tool, not a substitute for engineering judgment.

Nice to have (genuinely optional, please don't self-select out):

• Payments, card issuing, or transaction processing domain experience.

• Experience with PCI DSS certification or operating in a PCI DSS environment.

• Exposure to fraud detection or prevention.

• Experience with chaos/resilience testing, capacity planning, or load testing.

• Hands-on experience implementing safe deployment practices such as canary deployments, blue/green, or progressive rollouts.

WHAT WE OFFER

• The opportunity to work in a growing team with big responsibilities that thrives on a strong exchange of knowledge and excellence

• Attractive remuneration

• Your choice of preferred OS, Windows or Mac

• Flat hierarchy and transparent communication in a relaxed, professional atmosphere

• Opportunity to develop your talent in a dynamic team with ambitious goals

• Flexibility and possibility to work remotely

• Pliant Card with monthly credit to explore the product and enjoy food with colleagues

Pliant is an equal opportunity employer. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds, identities and abilities, and are committed to an inclusive hiring process. If you need any accommodations during the interview process, please let us know.