Backend Engineer, Payments

The role

You will own subscription payments end-to-end, managing the purchase, renewal, cancellation, refund, and entitlement lifecycles. You will build and improve backend payment infrastructure and establish engineering practices to ensure reliability at scale.

What you will do

• Own subscription payments end-to-end across mobile and web
• Build reliable payment infrastructure integrating with RevenueCat, Paddle, Stripe, Apple, and Google Play
• Implement safeguards like idempotent processing, webhook handling, and transaction reconciliation
• Establish monitoring, alerting, and operational processes to detect payment issues
• Lead technical investigations and incident response for production issues
• Evolve payments architecture to support new providers, markets, and pricing models
• Enable other engineering teams through clear interfaces, testing, and documentation
• Partner with Finance and Support to improve reconciliation and billing visibility
• Mentor engineers and guide architectural decisions

Required qualifications

• 10+ years of software engineering experience
• Track record of independently owning complex, business-critical production systems
• Deep experience with recurring subscriptions including renewals, cancellations, refunds, and failed payments
• Consumer mobile payments expertise with Apple App Store and Google Play
• Hands-on experience with RevenueCat, Paddle, Stripe Billing, or comparable platforms
• Strong foundation in distributed systems including asynchronous events, consistency, and idempotency
• Experience designing and operating reliable backend services and relational databases
• Track record of improving reliability and implementing durable improvements
• High ownership and autonomy in defining priorities and driving improvements
• Cross-functional technical leadership

Nice to have

• Experience migrating between subscription payment providers or consolidating fragmented architectures
• Experience with international subscriptions including multiple currencies, taxes, and regulatory requirements in APAC markets
• Experience building or operating shared subscription entitlement systems across mobile and web
• Experience scaling payments or subscription infrastructure for a consumer application with millions of users
• Experience as an early or founding engineer for a business-critical technical domain at a high-growth startup

About the company

Speak is building a human-level, AI-powered tutor that provides a conversation-first language learning experience. The company is a leading AI company with a distributed team across San Francisco, Seoul, Tokyo, Taipei, and Ljubljana.