Senior API Engineer - Remote

Company Description

PayNearMe develops award-winning technology to facilitate the end-to-end customer payment experience, making it easy for businesses to manage and accept payments. The company enables more ways to pay by offering all major payment types and channels in a single platform. PayNearMe is the technology company that’s changing how payments are made.

We are a diverse and collaborative company that loves to delight its customers (merchants, consumers, etc.) with simple, useful and practical product/service offerings. PayNearMe has over 200 employees, closed a $45M Series D round in June 2023, and is processing over $1B in payments monthly. We’re headquartered in Silicon Valley with our employees distributed all across the US. Help us reimagine payments!

We’re looking for a very skilled Ruby on Rails engineer to join a small but dynamic performance team, reporting to the CTO, in the role of Senior API Engineer. This position blends the analytical skills of a data analyst, the instincts of a high-performance coder, the imagination to come up with highly-performant designs, the drive to push your projects to completion, and the ability to work effectively with other teams. We love people who used to be the "go-to" person at their previous companies, but are now wanting to be part of a talented team.

Job Description

• You’ll be the primary owner of our APIs, helping us optimize and extend them
• For our existing APIs:
  • Build out performance tests for the high-usage calls (we use K6)
  • Use the results to tune these calls to be as efficient as possible (reader nodes, caching, etc)
  • Tune the default behavior for new clients to return minimal results
  • Ensure that our logging and monitoring is sufficient to detect potential problems (we use Datadog)
• Our APIs currently use an antiquated signature system, which requires much hand-holding
  • We have taken the first step towards OAuth 2.0 for one client (using Kong)
  • We want to make OAuth 2.0 available to all clients, running incoming requests through Kong
  • All of our APIs should run through this path so that Kong can do as much auth and validation as possible
• We use ReadMe to host our API documentation, with some well written documentation
  • Own the OpenAPI specification for our APIs
  • We need to point ReadMe at a separate and firewalled deployment and install an authentication system for clients to use
• With the experience gained above, start working on the next generation of APIs
  • How do we redesign them to be simple, modular and fast?
  • How do we design for 10x and beyond using horizontal scaling?

Qualifications

• Superb Ruby on Rails skills, with a minimum of 10 years of current Ruby on Rails experience
• Skilled at coding in Javascript, used in our performance test harness
• Experience and expertise building highly performant and high-throughput Ruby/Rails back-ends
• Experience with Go is a plus, but not required
• Experience building APIs, working with OpenAPI, and preferably Kong as well
• Familiarity with query optimization and web stack tuning (garbage collection, caching, throttling)
• Experience writing well instrumented code that can be monitored (we use Datadog)
• Understand the impacts of locking, network latency, batching, caching and I/O on software performance
• A proven track record in bringing clarity to ambiguous situations
• Ability to facilitate technical discussions, and to make challenging calls in a distributed team environment
• Familiarity with the AWS ecosystem
• Experience serving as a Tech-Lead

Additional Information

Benefits

• Base salary per year (paid semi-monthly)
• Fast- paced and professional work culture
• Stock options with standard startup vesting - 1 year cliff; 4 years total
• $50 monthly communication expense stipend to go towards your phone/internet bill
• $250 stipend to enhance your WFH setup
• Reimbursement for peripheral equipment: monitor (up to $400), keyboard and mouse (up to $200)
• Premium medical benefits including vision and dental (100% coverage for employees)
• Company-sponsored life and disability insurance
• Paid parental bonding leave
• Paid sick leave, jury duty, bereavement
• 401k plan
• Flexible Time Off (our team members typically take off ~3-4 weeks per year)
• Volunteer Time Off
• 13 scheduled holidays
• 2x / year in-person team meet-ups (2-3 days, company paid)

Salary Range: $185,000 - $215,000

PayNearMe strives to create a workplace where all employees thrive. Our core values represent who we are today and w