Staff Backend Engineer

Overview

Tilia is hiring a Staff Backend Engineer to own and evolve our financial services platform serving digital economies, virtual worlds, and creator platforms. We are a Go and Python shop running on AWS, using modern CI/CD to deliver a service oriented architecture. You'll spend most of your time developing our core systems, integrating to vendor services, fixing bugs, improving tests, and driving the technical design of new product features, while also shaping overall technical direction and supporting teammates. Success means delivering reliable systems, making the engineers around you more effective, and helping Tilia's customers pay creators worldwide. This role reports to the VP of Engineering.

The Role

As a Staff Backend Engineer, you will spend most of your time writing code while also providing technical leadership across the engineering organization. This is an individual contributor role with cross-team influence. We’re a small, senior team who ships daily in a highly regulated space.

Day-to-day:

• Technical design and development of product features
• Working with complex product requirements while maintaining clean abstractions
• Vendor integrations for payments, payouts, fraud, KYC, taxes, and more
• Writing and optimizing SQL and schema development in MySQL
• Producing clean data for data engineering consumption
• Writing unit, integration, and end-to-end tests
• Architectural documentation, reviews, guidance
• Cross-team collaboration with frontend, data engineering and devops
• On-call rotation, including occasional overnight pages

Collaborate with:

• Product, business development, support, data engineering, front-end engineering, tech ops, finance, compliance, and legal

Tech stack:

Go, Python, MySQL, Redis, Docker, Linux, AWS (ECS, Lambda, ElastiCache), REST, CI/CD

Success in this role means:

• Delivering reliable systems and features customers need
• Making the people around you more effective
• Improving system maintainability and reducing technical debt over time
• Cash money washes over us like tsunami

Travel: Some travel required for periodic team offsites.

Knowledge Required

Qualifications

A Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or a related field, but similar professional experience is equally valued. No specific certifications are required.

Experience

A proven track record of increasing responsibility and technical leadership over several years

Technical skills:

• Strong proficiency in Golang, with experience building and maintaining production services
• Python experience for scripting, testing, automation, and data-related work
• Deep SQL and MySQL expertise, including complex queries, query optimization, and schema design
• Hands-on experience with AWS services such as ECS, SNS, SQS, and ElastiCache
• Experience designing and implementing REST APIs in a service oriented architecture
• Solid understanding of distributed systems fundamentals, including consistency models, failure modes, and idempotency
• Demonstrated commitment to automated testing across unit, integration, and end-to-end levels
• Production ownership experience, including on-call rotations and incident response

Leadership and collaboration:

• Clear, effective communication of trade-offs to non-technical stakeholders
• History of collaboration with engineers and others
• Examples of positive influence on technical direction

Nice to have but in no way required:

• Experience in payments, fintech, or financial services
• Exposure to compliance requirements or regulated environments
• Experience with event-driven architectures or message queues
• Familiarity with data pipelines or ETL processes
• Background in virtual economies, gaming platforms, or creator economy products
• Multi-currency or foreign exchange experience
• Frontend or Full-stack development experience