Sr/Staff Backend Engineer
Senior/Staff Backend Engineer
Payments & Reconciliation
Location: Flexible
About the company
They are building the finance-first All-In-One Operating System for private education across Latin America.
Already trusted by 1,000+ schools and hundreds of thousands of families in Mexico, Colombia, and Ecuador.
Well-funded with $89M raised, fresh $50M debt facility, and a transformative acquisition that turns them into the full-stack OS for schools.
Mission: give every school perfect clarity, zero financial surprises, and the cash flow to never close its doors.
Role Overview
They need a Senior or Staff Backend Engineer to own the stabilization, redesign, and future evolution of the payments and reconciliation domain — the most mission-critical and gnarly system in the entire platform.
You will sit at the crossroads of financial correctness, data integrity, event-driven architecture, and AI-powered reliability. Your code will move tens of millions of dollars every year with zero tolerance for error.
You’ll eliminate reconciliation nightmares, kill legacy debt, ship real-time financial flows, and weaponize AI to catch anomalies before schools ever see them.
This is a “career-defining” role for someone who gets a rush from making financial systems bulletproof at scale.
What You’ll Lead
1. Modernize & Strengthen the Reconciliation Engine
Redesign reconciliation workflows to support both real-time and end-of-day processing
Standardize payments, refunds, adjustments, partial payments, and every edge case known to man
Produce clean, auditable outputs that make schools and finance teams breathe easy
Lock down data consistency across processors, internal systems, and reporting
Ship with AI engineering: automated reconciliation agents, ML anomaly detection, predictive mismatch flags
2. Improve Payment Application & Data Accuracy
Kill cross-country and cross-processor inconsistencies for good
Make transaction posting feel instant to parents and schools
Perfectly handle prepayments, partials, advances, adjustments, surcharges
Eradicate pending-state bugs, missing webhooks, and silent failures
Strengthen sync across event streams, APIs, and accounting
Deploy AI-assisted validation to slash manual reviews and human error
3. Enhance Invoicing & Billing Architecture
Fix calculation bugs and sync errors in the billing engine
Nail tax correctness and electronic invoicing for Mexico, Colombia, Ecuador
Help ship the next-gen invoicing platform across markets
Build deterministic, testable, boringly-predictable billing flows
Integrate AI/ML to catch tax anomalies, wrong totals, and recurring mistakes
4. Architecture, Scalability & Technical Debt Reduction
Drive the full migration to real-time, Kafka-based, event-driven architecture
Clean up data models, schemas, and service boundaries for 10× growth
Systematically burn down years of accumulated tech debt
Expand automated test coverage until critical flows are untouchable
Write the runbooks, diagrams, and specs that future engineers will thank you for
Build the infra for AI agents, event-scoring models, and self-healing reconciliation
Required Qualifications
7+ years of backend engineering experience
3+ years in payments, financial systems, or high-accuracy data workflows
Strong hands-on expertise in Python, Node.js, or similar backend languages
Deep experience with relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL) and data integrity patterns
Understanding of event-driven architecture, message queues, and asynchronous processing
Experience integrating with payment providers, banks, or financial APIs
Strong debugging, root-cause analysis, and system design abilities
Full professional proficiency in Spanish and English (written & spoken)
Preferred Qualifications
Experience with Latin American payment methods (OXXO, PSE, SPEI, Banred, etc.)
Familiarity with electronic invoicing systems and country-specific tax requirements
Experience with reconciliation platforms (e.g., Simetrik)
Background in high-throughput, mission-critical systems processing large financial volumes
Knowledge of accounting, ERP, or financial data models
Experience contributing to QA automation, observability, or reliability engineering
Experience working with AI, ML pipelines, or AI-assisted validation systems
Why Join
Play a foundational role in stabilizing and modernizing one of the most critical product areas
Architect complex, high-impact systems that power the financial backbone of thousands of schools
Collaborate with world-class engineering, product, and AI teams
Directly influence reliability for millions of tuition transactions each year
Remote-first culture with autonomy, ownership, and career growth
Opportunity to shape LATAM’s most important education-fintech infrastructure
Career growth opportunities as product, engineering, and the platform explode
Location: Flexible
Travel: Occasional travel to Mexico City for team onsite sessions
If you live for turning financial chaos into boring perfection and want your code to keep thousands of schools open, send your CV now. ⚡
- Department
- Engineering
- Role
- Sr. Software Engineer
- Locations
- Argentina, Chile, Colombia , Mexico, Uruguay
- Remote status
- Fully Remote
About Thaia
Boutique recruiting agency specializing in sourcing, selecting, and placing top-tier tech talent for companies across Latin America.
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