About the employer
A product company of about sixty people, seven years old, building payments-adjacent services that merchants in four countries use to take money and reconcile it. It has grown every year since its second and has never held a fundraising round large enough to make anybody careless about cost.
Engineering is two teams of six and runs its own infrastructure, which is unusual at this size and deliberate: the founders take the view that a company handling other people’s settlement cannot outsource the part that fails at three in the morning. The stack is typed end to end, code review is done by people who read the code, and the service ships weekly.
You would join the backend team, sit beside the two engineers who built the ledger, and take the on-call rota from your fourth month, paid, after somebody has walked you through every alarm on it.
Job Description
- Build and maintain backend services in a typed language, to the team’s agreed patterns
- Design database schemas and write migrations that survive production traffic
- Write unit and integration tests alongside the feature rather than after it
- Review your teammates’ code, and have yours reviewed, against a published standard
- Instrument what you ship with logs, metrics and traces, and read the dashboards afterwards
- Work with product on what an API should actually promise before it is built
- Join the on-call rota from your fourth month, with a senior engineer paired to you
Ascendradoes not discriminate on the basis of race, colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, refugee status, marital status, or based on an individual’s status in any group or class protected by applicable law. Ascendra encourages applications from minorities, women, the disabled, refugees and all other qualified applicants.
The Successful Applicant
- Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Systems or a related field
- Fluency in at least one typed backend language, from coursework, a placement or your own projects
- Working knowledge of SQL, including joins, indexes and what a transaction guarantees
- Understanding of HTTP as a protocol: methods, status codes, headers and idempotency
- Familiarity with Git and a pull request workflow
- Some exposure to automated testing, and the willingness to write tests as a habit
- A code interview you are willing to sit
What is on offer
- Hybrid working, two fixed days in the office
- A hardware budget and a structured onboarding month with a named mentor
- Paid on-call, joined in the fourth month rather than the first week
- Medical cover for you and your dependants, and NSSF
- Code review from engineers who have run payments systems in production
