About this roleWe're hiring our first dedicated payments engineer to own the reliability of payments at Speak. Every Speak payment is a subscription, and that revenue runs through Paddle, RevenueCat (the App Store and Google Play) and Stripe, with new providers on the way. Until now, payments work has been shared across teams without a single owner. You'll be that owner: the point of contact and directly responsible engineer for how Speak bills, renews, and grants access to millions of learners.
You'll start embedded with one of our growth teams, which also owns monetization, and over time anchor payments within our platform organization. As the first engineer in this area, you'll set the architecture, standards, and roadmap for payments at Speak, with a high degree of autonomy and a direct line to revenue.
What you'll be doing- Owning the reliability of Speak's subscription payments end to end, from purchase and renewal through cancellation, refunds, and entitlements
- Building and maintaining our integrations with Paddle, RevenueCat, and Stripe in Node.js, and leading the rollout of new payment providers
- Designing for correctness: idempotent webhook handling, reconciliation across providers, and safe retries
- Putting monitoring, alerting, and runbooks in place so payment issues are caught before learners or finance notice them
- Leading incident response and postmortems for payments, and fixing root causes
- Setting the standards for how other teams change payments code, and reviewing changes that touch billing
- Partnering with growth, product, finance, and support on pricing, paywall experiments, and revenue reporting
- Mentoring engineers and raising the reliability bar across our backend
What we're looking for- 10+ years of software engineering experience, including staff-level ownership of production systems
- Deep experience building and operating recurring subscription billing for a consumer product
- Hands-on experience with App Store or Google Play billing (directly or through RevenueCat), Stripe Billing, or Paddle
- Strong backend fundamentals in Node.js and TypeScript or a comparable language, with solid relational database skills
- A track record of making payment systems more reliable: fewer incidents, cleaner reconciliation, safer migrations
- Comfort defining your own roadmap in an area that doesn't have one yet
- Clear communication with engineering, product, and finance partners
- Contributing to an AI-native development workflow - reviewing plans and designs before implementation, creating strong verification loops, and shipping safely with AI-assisted tooling
- Excited about working in person in San Francisco at least 3 days per week
Nice to haves- Migrating between payment providers or consolidating several into one system
- International payments, taxes, and currencies, especially across APAC markets
- Worked on an app used by 1M+ users
- Built entitlement systems shared across mobile and web
