Founding Backend Engineer

Cephas Consultancy Services Private Limited

United States, California, San Francisco

Headcount: 1

Job Details

  • Experience: 2–5 years
  • Salary: Not specified
  • Equity: Competitive equity
  • Visa sponsorship: H-1B, O-1
  • Employment type: Full-time
  • Work arrangement: In person

Benefits & Perks

  • Meals
  • Health, dental, and vision insurance

About the Role

As the Founding Backend Engineer, you will own the systems that process payments and verify identity as the platform moves from a working product to real production traffic. A retry that runs twice can cause a double charge; a leaked credential can cause a breach. The codebase is relatively mature, so the focus is on the production layer: security, preparing for scale, detecting bad actors, technical compliance, and meeting SLAs. You will work closely with Lane’s two existing backend engineers, with a cross-functional focus on security, compliance, and scalability rather than a single product area. This is an individual-contributor role: you will shape the architecture, write code, and carry the pager for what you ship. The role is in person at the San Francisco office, roughly six days a week (Sunday through Friday), with flexibility on weekends.

Responsibilities

  • Build security and compliance into the code: minimize PCI scope; manage secrets and keys; implement access control and audit trails; and use SOC 2 / PCI DSS controls as checks, alongside threat modeling and incident response.
  • Run the AWS platform as infrastructure as code, including CI/CD, staged rollouts, and rollbacks.
  • Keep payments correct through authorization, capture, and reconciliation that are idempotent, auditable, and recoverable.
  • Own reliability through SLOs, instrumentation, outage prevention, and runbooks someone can follow at 2 a.m.
  • Drive efficiency by improving purchase-path latency and cost per transaction.

Requirements

  • Experience building backend systems that other systems and people depend on.
  • Strong correctness instincts, including idempotency, retries, distributed state, and failure modes.
  • A security-minded approach, including least privilege, secret handling, audit logging, and threat modeling.
  • Hands-on cloud experience (AWS preferred) and infrastructure as code.
  • Experience with TypeScript or Python.
  • Clear written communication: able to explain what broke, why, and what changed.
  • Availability to work roughly six days a week (Sunday through Friday).