Astra is looking for a Staff Backend Engineer to shape the core of our financial 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.
What You'll Do
- 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
What We're Looking For
- 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 like money, compliance, and reconciliation
- Comfortable taking projects from idea to implementation with minimal oversight
Nice to Have
- Experience with GCP, Terraform, payments/fintech, or event-driven architectures
Technical Stack
- Languages/Frameworks: Python (Flask/FastAPI), TypeScript (React)
- Infrastructure: GCP (App Engine, Pub/Sub, Cloud Tasks, BigQuery, Datastore, GCS)
- Tooling: Terraform, GitHub Actions, CircleCI, Cloud Logging
- Data: BigQuery, Datastore, GCS
Team & Environment
We’re a small, fast-moving team tackling hard problems in financial infrastructure. You’ll work closely with product, compliance, and operations.
Work Mode
This position is open to candidates based in the U.S.
We’re proud to be an equal opportunity employer and are committed to building a diverse and inclusive team.
