Principal Backend Engineer

Job description

Jeeves is a groundbreaking financial operating system built for global businesses that provides corporate cards, cross-border payments, and spend management software within one unified platform. The company operates across 20+ countries including Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Mexico, the United Kingdom, across Europe, and the United States, and serves over 5,000 clients ranging from venture-backed startups to SMBs around the world. With a mission to empower businesses with more efficient and cost-effective financial solutions worldwide, Jeeves combines cutting-edge financial technology with exceptional team expertise to transform the business financial landscape. Jeeves has been recognized as one of The Information's 50 Most Promising Startups in 2023, as well as a Y Combinator Top Company 2021-2023 and won “Fintech of the Year" at the European Fintech Awards. Since graduating from Y Combinator in 2020, Jeeves has successfully raised over $380 million and is backed by top world-class investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, CRV, Tencent, Stanford University, Clocktower Ventures, and founders of more than 15 unicorns including David Velez (Nubank), Carlos Garcia (Kavak) and Sebastián Mejía (Rappi). Jeeves is looking for a Senior Backend Engineer to join our LATAM engineering team. You will design and build the backend systems that power Jeeves's financial platform — working across payments, cards, spend management, and compliance infrastructure that serves businesses across the Americas and beyond. This is a backend engineering role at its core, we're looking for a strong backend engineer who knows how to work effectively with AI tools, understands where AI can accelerate development and product capabilities, and is comfortable integrating AI-powered features into production backend systems. Given the global nature of our business and the collaborative nature of our team, fluency in English is required for daily work with engineering, product, and business teams across multiple regions. Fluency in Spanish or Portuguese is equally required — our LATAM teams, customers, and operational partners work in both languages, and you will too. **Location**: This is a full-time remote position. #LI-REMOTE ### What You'll Do: **Backend Engineering** - Design, build, and maintain scalable, reliable backend services that process financial transactions and serve Jeeves customers across 20+ countries. - Write clean, testable, production-quality code in Go, Python, or Node.js/TypeScript; participate actively in design and code reviews. - Build and consume RESTful and GraphQL APIs; design inter-service communication using gRPC, message queues, and event-driven architectures. - Design and optimize relational and non-relational database schemas (PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis) for correctness, performance, and scale. - Own backend features end-to-end — from scoping and technical design through deployment, monitoring, and iteration. - Implement security best practices: authentication, authorization, input validation, and data protection across distributed services. **AI-Assisted Feature Development** - Integrate LLM API calls (e.g., OpenAI, Anthropic) into backend services as product features — such as spend categorization, document parsing, or natural language workflows — ensuring those integrations are reliable, observable, and cost-efficient. - Build backend pipelines that consume AI-generated outputs safely: validate structured outputs, handle fallback scenarios, and design graceful degradation when AI services are unavailable or return low-confidence results. - Collaborate with AI and data science teams to integrate model outputs into backend APIs — bridging experimental AI work and production systems. - Use AI coding tools (GitHub Copilot, Claude, Cursor, etc.) fluently as part of your everyday development workflow. **Reliability & Operations** - Instrument services with structured logging, distributed tracing, and metrics for full operational visibility. - Participate in on-call rotation; respond to production incidents and contribute to post-incident reviews. - Contribute to CI/CD pipeline improvements, testing infrastructure, and deployment practices. **Cross-Regional Collaboration** - Work closely with engineering, product, compliance, and data teams across multiple time zones and regions — communicating in both English and Spanish or Portuguese as the situation requires. - Contribute to a globally distributed engineering culture through thorough documentation, async design reviews, and thoughtful pull request feedback. - Bring your regional perspective to product and engineering conversations — our LATAM customers have specific needs, and engineers who understand those markets make our product better. ### Requirements: **Minimum Requirements** - 5+ years of professional backend engineering experience building and operating production systems. - Fluent in English — professional fluency required for daily work with global teams in written and spoken contexts. - Fluent in Spanish or Portuguese — required for collaboration with LATAM teammates, customers, and operational partners. - Strong proficiency in at least one backend language: Go, Python, or Node.js/TypeScript. - Experience designing and building RESTful APIs, microservices, and event-driven backend systems. - Solid understanding of relational databases (PostgreSQL preferred): schema design, query optimization, and data modeling. - Experience with cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and CI/CD pipelines. - Demonstrated ability to integrate third-party APIs reliably in production — including error handling, retry logic, and observability. - Experience working on globally distributed teams across time zones and regions. - Comfortable using AI tools as part of everyday engineering work — integrating LLM API outputs into backend services and using AI coding assistants fluently. **Preferred Qualifications** - Experience in fintech, financial services, payments, or a regulated industry — familiarity with ledger systems, payment rails, or financial compliance (KYC/AML, PCI-DSS) is a strong plus. - Prior experience at a startup or high-growth scale-up, comfortable building in ambiguity without heavy process support. - Experience with multi-currency systems or cross-border payment processing. - Familiarity with message queue systems (Kafka, RabbitMQ) and event-driven architecture. - Global work experience — prior roles at companies operating across multiple countries and regulatory environments. - Fluency in both Spanish and Portuguese is a meaningful additional asset.