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Staff Engineer (Backend) - Platform
Ajaib
Source: Headcount Labs · original listing ↗
Job data: Headcount Labs, ODbL 1.0. Job descriptions belong to their employers.
Posted 3 days ago
About this role
Founded to transform retail finance, Ajaib Group is an Indonesian fintech unicorn breaking barriers to financial access. Having recently secured a $270M Series C—the single largest funding round in Southeast Asia over the past four years—we are backed by premier global investors including Y Combinator, Ribbit Capital, SoftBank, and SBI Holdings. To build world-class products, we assemble world-class talent. Supported by our fully remote work arrangement, our team spans Eastern Europe, the Middle East, India, and Southeast Asia, allowing you to work with brilliant engineers and builders from around the globe from wherever you are. We operate with an impact-driven purpose where everyone is the owner of our customers' satisfaction. Driven by a growth mindset and a fierce will to win, we refuse to settle and constantly push engineering boundaries. Role Overview As a Staff Engineer (Backend) in the Platform team, you set the technical direction for the shared foundations that every Ajaib product runs on: identity, core services, API standards, observability and developer tooling. You treat the platform as a product whose customers are other engineers, solve the hardest cross-team problems, and make engineers across the company stronger. You stay hands-on where it matters most. * Define the technical direction and architecture for platform systems that span many teams. * Lead the design of scalable, secure, multi-tenant services and review critical designs from other teams. * Set API and contract standards across the company: versioning, backward compatibility, deprecation and documentation. * Lead the architecture of identity and access: authentication, authorization, token handling and service-to-service security. * Design for reliability: service level objectives, rate limiting, isolation between consumers, graceful degradation and disaster recovery. * Build the golden paths that make good engineering the easy path: service templates, shared libraries, CI/CD standards and observability defaults. * Architect and execute seamless, zero-downtime structural migrations across many teams, with clear timelines, tooling and support. E.g., identity providers, gateway layers across the organization using the Strangler pattern and backward-compatible proxying. * Identify technical risks early, weigh trade-offs and drive decisions that fit business and regulatory needs. * Lead investigations and root cause analysis for complex production incidents, and drive lasting improvements. * Partner with Engineering Managers, Product, Security, Infrastructure and Architecture on cross-team initiatives. * Mentor Senior Engineers and help grow technical leadership across the company. * Stay hands-on with implementation for critical components and complex problems. * Design and implement highly resilient, low-latency API Gateways that standardize authentication, routing, and rate-limiting across hundreds of microservices. * Drive the evolution of our identity platform (OAuth2, OIDC, Zero Trust) to support seamless, highly secure access patterns for millions of retail investors and internal services. Requirements * Education: Bachelor's or Master's degree in Computer Science or equivalent practical experience. * Experience: 8+ years of professional software engineering, with a proven record of designing and running platform or shared services used by many teams, and leading technical work across teams. * Languages: Highly proficient in Java, Go or another modern backend language. * System Design & Architecture: Strong expertise in microservices, event-driven architectures, multi-tenant design, reliability engineering, observability and performance optimization. * Security: Deep knowledge of authentication and authorization (Keycloak / Ory Stack, OAuth2, OpenID Connect, JWT, mTLS) and secure system design. * Data & Messaging: Deep practical experience with Kafka, Redis, and relational and NoSQL databases, including query tuning and data consistency. * Infrastructure: Experience designing and operating applications on cloud platforms (GCP, AWS) and Kubernetes. * Mindset: Product mindset toward internal users. Strong communication, with the ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority. Experience in fintech or another regulated environment is a plus. * Proven experience migrating live, high-traffic consumer systems to modern identity providers (like Keycloak or Ory) without user disruption is a strong plus Benefits * Performance Bonus - Get rewarded for the impact you make * Private Insurance - Comprehensive health coverage for you * Paid Time Off - Take the time you need to recharge and come back stronger * Learning & Development - Company-sponsored training, courses, and professional certifications * Hybrid Work Arrangement - Enjoy the flexibility of working both remotely and from the office * Career Growth - Work closely with experienced leaders and take on meaningful ownership as we scale * Employee Perks - Enjoy exclusive discounts, partnerships, and lifestyle perks * Collaborative & High-Ownership Culture - Work with smart, driven people in cross-functional teams, take ownership, and make a meaningful impact for our users.