Senior Backend Engineer

Hiire is helping an ambitious early-stage fintech build a real-time compliance platform, and we’re looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join the team in Porto.

The platform helps financial institutions and fintechs verify businesses, identify risks and automate complex compliance processes using real-time data and agentic AI. You’ll join an experienced international team with a strong track record of building and scaling products at leading technology and fintech companies.

This is a hands-on product engineering role where you’ll work closely with the founders, own critical systems from architecture to production and help define how the engineering team operates as the company grows.

What you’ll be working on

You’ll design and build customer-facing REST APIs that are intuitive, reliable and easy for developers to integrate with. You’ll also own the systems responsible for collecting, processing and structuring the data that powers the platform.

Your work will include building resilient data ingestion pipelines, developing scalable web scraping and parsing components and solving distributed systems challenges involving asynchronous processing, queues, retries, idempotency and eventual consistency.

You’ll ship frequently, monitor how your solutions perform in production and iterate based on customer feedback. As an early member of the team, you’ll also have a genuine influence on architecture, engineering standards and culture.

What we’re looking for

• At least five years of backend engineering experience, with a track record of owning production systems end-to-end

• Three or more years of experience with Python, or strong experience with a similar language and the willingness to work primarily with Python

• Strong experience designing clean, versioned and developer-friendly REST APIs

• Solid understanding of distributed systems and asynchronous architectures

• Experience with queues, pub/sub, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency and designing systems for failure

• Strong relational database skills with PostgreSQL or MySQL, including data modelling, indexing, query optimisation and schema evolution

• Experience working with AWS, GCP or Azure and shipping software through CI/CD pipelines

• A product engineering mindset and the ability to translate real customer problems into practical solutions

• Strong communication skills and comfort working in a collaborative, fast-moving environment

It would be great if you also have

• Experience building and operating web scrapers at scale

• Experience in fintech, KYC/AML, fraud, compliance or another regulated and security-sensitive environment

• Experience with high-throughput data pipelines or stream-processing technologies such as Kafka, Pub/Sub, Dataflow or Flink

• Experience with Rust, Go or C++ for performance-critical components

What you can expect

• A competitive salary and equity package

• A permanent position with meaningful ownership and real-world impact

• Direct collaboration with the founders and an experienced international team

• A flat structure where ideas and technical judgment are valued

• The opportunity to shape the product, architecture and engineering culture from an early stage

• Private health insurance

• Top-of-the-line equipment

• Sick and compassionate leave when needed

• A hybrid working model with two days per week in the Porto office