Lead Backend Engineer

Role’s Mission

At Aplazo, our mission is to empower financial access, opportunity and freedom, by connecting people and businesses in Latin America, through fair, simple, and transparent financial solutions, and we are looking for a Senior Backend Engineer - Platform to help us get there.

Technology @Aplazo also has a vision to be the most beloved and innovative tech organization in Latin America, so we are looking for technologists who are excited to be at the forefront of financial innovation and inclusion.

As a Senior Backend Engineer on our Platform team, you will help build the next generation of backend systems that empower thousands of merchants to grow across Mexico. We need a product‑minded technical individual contributor to help create new products, learn to optimize our existing stack, and work closely with the team to develop our Platform and Core architecture.

As a Senior or Staff Level (E3/E4) Engineer, you are expected to set a strong tone of team collaboration, attention to detail, and dedication to quality. To be successful you are self‑motivated, want to excel at communication, empathetic, and driven to achieve. You also need to exude strong teamwork and collaboration skills, including the ability to be mentored. You will be working alongside a team with deep roots in product, technology, and culture focused companies (Uber, Google, Rappi, Stitch Fix).

Key responsibilities

• Scale our Core Services Ecosystem: You will help architect and build the backend systems that our Customers and internal teams interact with every day. As we grow, these systems will need to be stable, fast, and scalable. You will need to set objectives and be accountable for completing them.
• Solve Problems: This is first and foremost your responsibility as an Engineer. You have many tools at your disposal (Development, communication, new process). Figure out what needs to be done to solve platform and core problems, verify, and execute.
• Technical work: Write (and/or learn) plenty of sustainable, testable, high‑quality, high‑performance code (and be willing to be mentored on how to do the same).
• Team work: Be proactive, ask, and participate in discussions on topics such as testing, and code quality. Don’t be afraid to approach others with technical questions/problems.
• Practice the ways of Devops – Improving our processes, feedback, systems, culture, and workflows in order to empower autonomous technical teams to deliver the greatest value is essential to our mission.
• Foster a culture of observability and monitoring: Be open to learning how to use operational data to help your team improve the stability and performance of our systems. Help to foster a culture of measuring, validating, and acting upon data.
• Learn and Evolve: Be open to learning how to scale yourself, taking feedback, and also help others to scale their own talents.

Aplazo Engineering Competency Matrix

This role is equal to a level E3 or E4 in our Engineering Competency Matrix, our internal career growth system for engineering. These are the minimum expectations for this position, but we are always willing to discuss bringing people on at more senior positions when appropriate. Reach out if you would like to learn more about how we evaluate “seniority” at Aplazo.

Requirements

Must have

• Years of experience: 4+ years in developing integration software systems.
• Technical skills:
  • Experience working on teams and projects that have dealt with E‑commerce APIs and distributed systems.
  • You write code that’s easily readable, testable, and maintainable.
  • You have worked with some/all of our technology stack: Backend (Java) (w/ some Python and Go mixed in AWS tools (ECS, Lambdas), Ci/CD (Pulumi, Jenkins), Observability (DataDog).
  • Good habits with technical documentation and knowledge sharing.
• Soft skills:
  • You have heard of people over process (Agile), but understand that good process leads to better work (Devops). You understand that workflow hygiene (well defined user‑stories/tasks and estimation) is important.
  • You are good at managing the ambiguity of a rapidly‑growing company: adjusting to changing priorities, and asking for help when guidance is limited and information is incomplete.
  • Excellent communication skills: Understand the importance of sharing and collaborating with peers both verbally and in writing (in Spanish, with ability to also communicate with vendors or teammates in English as necessary).
  • You work well on team projects with multiple stakeholders, contributors, and are comfortable contributing to technical projects for your team.
  • You have a growth mindset and seek mentorship to be your best self.
  • You have worked in Fintechs with Backend/API teams.
  • You are comfortable working and discussing common backend patterns.
  • You have heard of the State of Devops.
  • You have worked with/heard of Oncall and Incident Response processes.
  • You favor regular, incremental delivery of value over perfection.
  • You like small units of work, PR comments, and feedback.
  • You’re excited about ensuring that all of our systems‑software and human‑scale smoothly.
  • You strive for continuous learning and improvement for yourself and your team.

Personal data collected during the recruitment process will be processed in accordance with the Privacy Notice of Aplazo, S.A. de C.V. (“Aplazo”), available at our Privacy and Policy Notice.

Aplazo does not discriminate on the basis of race, religion, skin color, sex, gender, age, ethnic or national origin, marital status, disability, social or economic status, sexual preferences, or any other condition or characteristic. Selection is based solely on the qualifications and merits of the candidates.