Staff Backend Engineer

Astra is building modern infrastructure for moving money. We provide APIs and automation tools that power real-time transfers, bank debits, card disbursements, and more. Our platform is designed for observability, reliability, and scale.

We’re looking for a backend engineer with strong system design experience and a high level of ownership. You’ll help shape the core of Astra’s platform, including our global ledger, orchestration layer, and customer-facing APIs. You’ll work closely with product, compliance, and operations to deliver reliable systems that move and reconcile millions of dollars every day.

This is a great fit for someone who thrives in early-stage environments and wants to build foundational systems from the ground up.

• Design and own key backend systems, such as payments orchestration, ledger primitives, and internal operational flows

• Help evolve our service architecture as we scale, including how we model financial state, manage auth, and handle retries

• Write clean, well-tested Python code using Flask and GCP-managed services

• Work closely with other engineers, product, and cross-functional teams to understand customer needs and deliver robust APIs and features

• Contribute to our observability, reliability, and deployment workflows

• Participate in code reviews, tech planning, and mentoring

• 7+ years of experience building backend systems in production

• Strong system design and architecture skills. You’ve designed services that scale and evolve

• Expertise in Python and API design; experience with Flask or similar frameworks

• Familiarity with distributed systems, asynchronous processing, and idempotency

• A product-minded engineer who enjoys building platforms with real-world constraints (money, compliance, reconciliation)

• Comfortable taking projects from idea to implementation with minimal oversight

• Bonus: experience with GCP, Terraform, payments/fintech, or event-driven architectures

• Languages: Python (Flask/FastAPI), TypeScript (React)

• Infra: GCP (App Engine, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, BigQuery, Datastore, GCS), Terraform

• CI/CD & Monitoring: GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Cloud Logging

• Data: BigQuery, Datastore, GCS

We’re a small, fast-moving team tackling hard problems in financial infrastructure. From real-time money movement to chargeback automation and reconciliation, we aim to make money movement programmable, transparent, and scalable.

As an early engineer, you’ll have real ownership over architecture and systems that directly impact customer experiences. Your work will go into production and shape our platform for years to come.

Astra is a remote-first company hiring only within the U.S. We value thoughtful collaboration, clarity, and initiative. We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.