Staff Backend Engineer | JVM

The role

You will drive backend technical direction, platform architecture and engineering standards across squads, as an individual contributor with company-wide technical leadership. You will work on the credit, payments and marketplace services that customers and allies across Latin America rely on.

What you will do

• Deliver at least one material business result in your domain, such as better payment success rates, faster and safer onboarding, or a faster delivery pipeline.
• Re-engineer the backend of the highest-volume revenue flows: credit decisioning and onboarding, ally checkout and payments, repayments and collections.
• Own the reliability, scalability, performance, security, cost and operability of the platform you land in.
• Design and drive adoption of shared foundations: service templates, shared libraries, messaging and event standards, and CI/CD and release practices.
• Set and support SLOs and error budgets by service tier, and lead root-cause analysis on the hardest production incidents.
• Turn backend security and quality standards into CI gates that every squad follows.
• Roll out the agentic coding setup (AGENTS.md conventions, skills, spec templates, CI gates) so backend squads build AI-natively.
• Shape technical direction by writing RFCs and ADRs and getting them adopted as the backend standard.
• Mentor senior engineers and help some grow toward Staff and Tech Lead roles.
• Take part in incident leadership and on-call.

Required qualifications

• 15+ years building production software, with 8+ years owning the architecture of large-scale distributed backend systems.
• 4+ years at Staff, Principal or Software Architect level, driving decisions across multiple squads.
• Expert in the JVM ecosystem (Java, Kotlin or Scala, with Spring Boot).
• Strong command of SQL/PostgreSQL, Redis, messaging (Kafka, SQS, RabbitMQ), event-driven design, AWS and Kubernetes.
• Experience writing RFCs/ADRs and driving them to adoption.
• Track record of creating a shared standard adopted by 4+ teams.
• Experience leading large re-architectures or modernizations while the product kept shipping.
• Use of agentic CLIs (Claude Code, Factory Droid or similar) as the default way of writing code.
• Experience defining SLOs and delivering measurable performance, availability or cost wins.
• Experience defining security and testing practices across teams (authN/authZ, PII, OWASP, PCI).

Nice to have

• Working knowledge of API gateways, GraphQL/BFF layers, third-party integrations (payment processors, credit bureaus) and end-to-end auth flows (OAuth, token issuing and refresh).

Benefits

• Generous salary.
• Equity in the company.
• Benefits that go beyond the basics to support growth.

Before you apply

• Each step of the hiring process has a set length: a 30-minute recruiter interview, a 45-minute technical interview, a take-home challenge with one week to complete, a 60-minute deep dive interview, an

About the company

Addi is a financial platform building payments, shopping and banking solutions, and is Colombia's leading Buy Now, Pay Later provider. It serves over 3.6 million customers and partners with more than 55,000 merchants.