Staff Backend Engineer

Join Altruist, a fast-growing fintech company, as a Staff Backend Engineer. In this role, you will lead engineering best practices, own cross-service problems, and design and build identity and access management capabilities. You will also strengthen our AWS and cloud infrastructure, improve database performance, and drive production reliability. Altruist offers competitive compensation, health benefits, and a commitment to inclusivity.

Act as a leader and steward of engineering best practices, helping to mentor other engineers and develop impactful solutions.

Domain exposure (a plus) — Fintech, payments, or other security-sensitive, highly regulated environments

Don’t meet every single requirement? Studies have shown that women and people of color are less likely to apply to jobs unless they meet every single qualification

USD 200,000 - 265,000

About Altruist

A track record of building, not just reviewing — You've shipped meaningful work in security, scale, or infrastructure. This is a builder role, not a Security/AppSec role: we're looking for engineers who own remediation and deliver hardened systems

Assurance — Your confidence is brilliant, yet ego-less. You possess a strong knowledge base, the ability to discover the unknown, and are open to differing perspectives

Superb communication — Intentional dialogue is a superpower. You listen as well as you share your perspective with others

Ownership — The pride you put into every aspect of your work is unparalleled and undeniable

Resilience — We're inspired by your unwavering determination to achieve success, no matter the adversity you face along the way

Responsibilities

• Own systemic, cross-service problems end to end — from problem definition through design, implementation, and rollout.
• Design, build, and harden identity and access management capabilities: authentication, authorization, RBAC, and OAuth/OIDC flows.

Requirements

• Experience — 6+ years of software engineering experience building precise and scalable distributed systems with best engineering practices
• Creative problem solving — Identifying the problem is simply not enough. You're instinctually creative with your approach in finding solutions to roadblocks
• Education — Ideally looking for a B.A. / B.S. degree in relevant fields such as Computer Science or similar Engineering/Mathematics degrees
• Technical aptitude — You're technologically savvy and can easily get up to speed on modern tech stacks (Java, Spring Boot, Microservices, AWS, Postgres, Kubernetes). Strong Java + AWS is a great anchor

Preferred

• Full-stack with a backend lean (a plus) — You're primarily a backend engineer but comfortable working across the stack; a core engineering background is preferred over a purely product-focused one