About this role
Our backend is the engine that moves real money across borders in seconds. We are looking for a Backend Engineer who takes reliability, security, and correctness seriously — because when our systems work, families get paid and businesses run. When they don’t, real people feel it.
You will build and maintain the services that handle transfers, FX conversion, account management, and payment rails across 50+ countries, in a small, high-output team where ownership is real and the loop from code to production is short.
What you'll do
- Design and build APIs, microservices, and background workers that power our transfer and account infrastructure
- Integrate with payment and banking partners and FX liquidity providers across Africa, the UK, and North America
- Own reliability and observability for the services you build — write tests, add monitoring, define SLAs
- Work with the compliance team to ensure our systems meet the regulatory requirements of the markets we serve
- Review code, define architecture standards, and help junior engineers ship confidently
What we're looking for
- 4+ years building production backend systems at scale
- Strong Node.js or Go experience — ideally both; we use both
- Deep understanding of PostgreSQL, schema design, and query optimization
- Experience building and integrating with payment APIs
- Comfort designing distributed systems: queues, retries, idempotency, eventual consistency
- Security-minded: you know what SQL injection, SSRF, and auth vulnerabilities look like in the wild
Nice to have
- Experience with financial systems, ledgers, or double-entry bookkeeping in code
- Familiarity with PCI-DSS, GDPR, or financial regulatory frameworks
- Experience with Redis, message queues (BullMQ, SQS), or event-driven architectures
- Prior work on multi-currency or FX systems
What we offer
- Salary: £70,000 – £90,000, reviewed every 6 months
- Equity — stock options for every employee from day one, vesting over 4 years with a 1-year cliff
- Remote-first — work from anywhere, with team members across multiple countries
- Learning budget for courses, books, and conferences every year
- Comprehensive health cover for you and your dependants
- Best-in-class equipment — MacBook Pro and any tools you need
- Flexible hours and unlimited PTO — we mean it
About Axra
Axra is a cross-border money platform for the African diaspora — sending, spending, and saving across GBP, EUR, and USD with real-time transfers to 50+ African countries. We operate under Money Services Business (MSB) registrations in Canada, the UK, and the USA, and we are growing fast in a market that has been underserved by expensive, opaque incumbents for too long.