Senior Backend / Platform Engineer

Senior Backend / Platform Engineer

Remote | Equity-Only | Early-Stage Fintech

Compensation: Equity only at this stage. No cash salary currently.

Fynancr is an early-stage fintech company preparing for its pre-seed financing. We have a working product and are building the technical foundation required for institutional pilots and future production deployments.

We are looking for a Senior Backend / Platform Engineer who wants meaningful ownership at a very early stage and understands the tradeoff involved in joining before institutional funding.

This is not a conventional salaried engineering role today. We are looking for someone who wants to help build the company alongside the founding team and participate meaningfully in the upside through equity.

About Fynancr

Fynancr is building financial technology infrastructure for financial institutions managing complex customer financial-resolution workflows.

Our goal is to help institutions manage financial hardship, customer resolution, internal operations, financial information, and downstream workflows through a more connected and structured platform.

We are currently a small team consisting of the Founder & CEO and a Full Stack Developer.

This role will have substantial influence over Fynancr's backend architecture, infrastructure, security, integrations, reliability, and future engineering organization.

The Role

We are looking for a senior engineer who can help turn a working product into a secure, reliable, production-ready platform suitable for financial institutions.

You will work directly with the Founder and our Full Stack Developer across:

• Backend architecture
• APIs
• Data systems
• AWS infrastructure
• Security
• Authentication and authorization
• Production reliability
• Observability
• Institutional integrations
• Engineering standards

This role requires someone comfortable operating without a large engineering organization, detailed specifications, or layers of management.

You will be expected to identify problems, make strong technical decisions, communicate tradeoffs, and take ownership of outcomes.

What You'll Own

Backend & Platform Architecture

• Design and evolve backend services and APIs
• Build reliable services supporting financial and operational workflows
• Improve scalability, performance, and fault tolerance
• Design robust relational data models
• Establish clean service boundaries and integration patterns
• Build systems that support auditability and historical traceability
• Reduce technical debt where it creates meaningful reliability, security, or scalability risk
• Make pragmatic architectural decisions that balance execution speed with long-term maintainability

Cloud & Infrastructure

• Help own and improve Fynancr's AWS infrastructure
• Improve deployment and environment-management practices
• Strengthen CI/CD
• Improve infrastructure automation
• Establish stronger development, staging, and production environments
• Improve production reliability and operational resilience
• Reduce unnecessary manual infrastructure processes

Security

Security is a core product requirement at Fynancr.

You will help:

• Strengthen authentication and authorization
• Implement least-privilege access patterns
• Improve role and permission architecture
• Protect sensitive data in transit and at rest
• Improve secrets and credential management
• Build meaningful audit logging
• Improve security monitoring
• Support vulnerability identification and remediation
• Work with external security and compliance specialists
• Help prepare Fynancr for institutional security reviews and future compliance programs

You will not be expected to act as legal or regulatory counsel, but you should understand the engineering discipline required when building software for financial institutions.

Reliability & Observability

• Improve application monitoring
• Establish meaningful logging and alerting
• Improve incident visibility
• Build better failure detection and recovery
• Improve operational resilience
• Help establish incident-response practices
• Identify reliability risks before they become customer-facing problems

Institutional Integrations

• Design and build APIs and integration frameworks
• Support secure data exchange with external systems
• Work with different institutional technical environments
• Help establish repeatable integration patterns
• Reduce dependency on one-off custom engineering
• Participate in technical discussions with prospective institutional customers when appropriate

Engineering Quality

• Write clear, maintainable, production-quality code
• Review architecture and code critically
• Improve testing practices
• Strengthen engineering standards
• Document important technical decisions
• Document infrastructure, APIs, and system architecture
• Help establish engineering practices that can scale with the company

What We're Looking For

Required

• Strong backend engineering experience
• Experience building and operating production systems
• Strong API design experience
• Strong SQL and relational database experience
• Experience with AWS or comparable cloud infrastructure
• Strong understanding of authentication and authorization
• Strong understanding of application and infrastructure security
• Experience with CI/CD and production deployments
• Experience with monitoring, logging, and observability
• Strong software engineering fundamentals
• Strong testing discipline
• Ability to independently identify and resolve complex technical problems
• Strong engineering judgment
• Comfort working in a small, fast-moving startup
• Ability to work directly with a founder and take broad ownership

Strong Plus

Experience in one or more of the following:

• Fintech
• Banking
• Lending
• Payments
• Loan servicing
• Financial infrastructure
• Enterprise SaaS
• Regulated technology
• AWS IAM
• Cloud security
• Infrastructure as code
• Event-driven systems
• Multi-tenant SaaS architecture
• Enterprise integrations
• SOC 2 readiness
• Audit logging
• Data privacy controls
• Incident response
• Security-sensitive applications

How You Think

The right person for this role:

• Treats security and reliability as product requirements
• Understands that financial software requires strong engineering discipline
• Challenges weak technical decisions
• Communicates risks clearly
• Understands tradeoffs between speed and engineering rigor
• Avoids unnecessary architecture complexity
• Documents important decisions
• Takes responsibility for production outcomes
• Can make progress without perfect specifications
• Thinks beyond individual tickets
• Is comfortable wearing multiple technical hats
• Wants meaningful technical ownership

What This Role Is Not

This role is probably not a fit if you are looking for:

• A conventional salaried role today
• A large engineering team
• Narrowly defined backend tickets
• Heavy management structure
• Dedicated specialists for every technical domain
• A role where infrastructure, security, or production operations belong entirely to someone else
• Fully defined requirements before work begins

At this stage, we need a builder who can take responsibility for systems, not simply complete assigned tickets.

Who You'll Work With

You will work directly with:

• Founder & CEO
• Full Stack Developer

The engineering team is intentionally small.

You will have direct influence over technical decisions and how the engineering organization develops as Fynancr grows.

What Success Looks Like

During your first several months, we would expect meaningful progress toward:

• A hardened production backend
• Stronger cloud infrastructure
• Reliable deployment practices
• Strong authentication and authorization
• Better production observability
• Improved security controls
• Scalable integration architecture
• Clear system documentation
• Stronger testing and engineering standards
• Reduced technical and operational risk
• A platform increasingly prepared for institutional pilots and technical diligence

Longer term, we want this person to become a trusted technical owner who can help Fynancr scale without sacrificing reliability, security, or execution speed.

Compensation & Equity

This role is equity-only at the current stage. There is no cash salary today.

We expect to offer approximately 1.5% to 3% equity, depending on:

• Experience
• Level of commitment
• Technical ownership
• Scope of responsibility
• Long-term role within the company

Any equity grant will be subject to formal company documentation, board approval where required, and applicable vesting terms.

Our current expectation is that equity would generally vest over a standard multi-year period, with final terms established in the applicable equity agreement.

Fynancr intends to introduce competitive cash compensation once the company has sufficient financing and operating resources. Future salary is dependent on financing and company circumstances and is not guaranteed as part of the initial equity arrangement.

This opportunity is best suited to someone who:

• Can financially support themselves during the equity-only period
• Understands the risk of joining a pre-funding startup
• Wants meaningful ownership
• Believes the upside justifies taking early-stage risk
• Wants to help build the company rather than simply join it later

We want candidates to understand the compensation structure before applying. There should be no surprise later in the process.

Why Join Now

This is an opportunity to join Fynancr while major technical and organizational decisions are still being made.

You will have meaningful influence over:

• Backend architecture
• Infrastructure
• Security
• Engineering standards
• Integrations
• Production operations
• Technical roadmap
• Future engineering hiring

You will be joining before institutional funding, which means higher risk, but also substantially more ownership and influence than would typically be available at a later-stage company.

The systems you help design now can become part of Fynancr's long-term technical foundation.

Interview Process

Our process focuses on engineering judgment and practical problem-solving rather than algorithm memorization.

Expect:

1. Founder conversation
2. Technical background and architecture discussion
3. Practical backend or system-design problem
4. Security, infrastructure, and reliability discussion
5. Final conversation focused on ownership, working style, expectations, and long-term fit

We care about how you reason, what risks you identify, how you make tradeoffs, and whether you can help build systems we can responsibly put in front of financial institutions.