PayGood Product Engineer

Founding Team ExpectationsCurrently funded through LaunchGood, PayGood is positioned to develop a fintech payment processing product that treats everyone fairly—beginning with the Muslim community and extending to all. Learn more about it here:https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/jan/01/muslim-friendly-websites-appsWhat We’re Looking ForJoining the founding team at PayGood.com means stepping into a builder’s role where you will be responsible for leading the product from zero to one. As a founder, you will:

1. Own the Mission: Take full accountability for the development, growth, and operational success of PayGood.
2. Strategize and Execute: Define the vision and drive execution to deliver a best-in-class fintech product. Understand customer needs, analyze market opportunities, and lead the charge in turning ideas into impactful solutions.
3. Focus on Customers: Engage directly with users to address their pain points, ensuring the product meets their evolving needs. Build trust and maintain open communication with stakeholders.
4. Collaborate and Solve Problems: Partner with engineers and other team members to overcome technical and operational challenges, ensuring seamless product functionality and integration.
5. Navigate Ambiguity: Lead with resilience and adaptability, taking on the challenges of early-stage growth with creativity and resourcefulness.

About the Role: As a Product Engineer specializing in Fintech, you'll be instrumental in building our payment processing platform with a relentless focus on developer experience and customer obsession. You'll design and build the systems that other developers and businesses will integrate with  — creating intuitive SDKs, robust APIs, and developer-friendly tools that make payment processing seamless and delightful.

Your work will bridge technical excellence with deep customer empathy. You'll spend time understanding how developers think, what merchants need, and how end-users experience payments. This insight will shape everything you build—from API design decisions to SDK ergonomics to integration documentation. You will own the complete stack; starting from ideation to the backend and infrastructure components, to the final UX (frontend systems)  that customers and developers will consume. 

You will intimately work with LaunchGood engineering & product teams as a way to 

You’ll be responsible for:

Building Developer-First Products

• Design and develop SDKs, client libraries, and APIs that developers love to integrate with—prioritizing clarity, consistency, and ease of use
• Build abstraction layers that wrap and unify diverse payment processor APIs into a cohesive, elegant interface that hides complexity while maintaining flexibility
• Create comprehensive documentation, code examples, and integration guides that enable developers to go from zero to production quickly

Customer-Centric Problem Solving

• Engage directly with customers (merchants, developers, and end-users) to deeply understand their unique payment scenarios and pain points
• Address complex use cases such as split payments, usage-based billing, subscription management, and multi-party transactions
• Translate customer feedback and market needs into technical solutions that scale across diverse business models

Building Scalable Fintech Infrastructure

• Design and implement secure, resilient backend systems for our payment gateway and merchant portal
• Architect for scalability and reliability using appropriate system design patterns that support high availability and fault tolerance
• Ensure seamless integration with CRMs like Salesforce, accounting systems, and other business tools that merchants depend on

Operational Excellence

• Maintain production systems through on-call rotations, monitoring, and proactive issue resolution
• Instrument applications with observability tools to understand system behavior and customer experience
• Collaborate with other stakeholders to test and refine system constraints in partnership with payment processors and providers
• Build and maintain CI/CD pipelines and comprehensive automated test suites (unit, integration, and end-to-end)

What sets you apart:

Product Engineering Mindset

• 5+ years building products that other developers or systems integrate with (SDKs, APIs, developer tools, B2B platforms)
• Proven track record of designing APIs and developer experiences that prioritize usability, not just functionality
• Deep empathy for developers as customers—you understand integration friction points and design to eliminate them
• Experience gathering customer feedback and translating it into technical decisions and product improvements

Fintech & Payments Expertise

• Strong experience with payment processing, financial systems, or fintech products (highly preferred)
• Understanding of payment flows, compliance requirements (PCI-DSS, KYC/AML), and security best practices in regulated environments
• Experience working with payment processors, CRMs, or complex third-party integrations

Technical Excellence

• Expert-level proficiency in backend development with Node.js (TypeScript), Python, Golang, or similar languages
• Expert-level proficiency in frontend frameworks and libraries such as React
• Deep understanding of component-based design system
• Deep knowledge of API design (REST, GraphQL), database architecture (PostgreSQL or similar), and system integration patterns
• Experience building and maintaining SDKs for external developers, including creating abstraction layers over existing third-party SDKs
• Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, or Azure) and distributed systems
• Expertise in resilient architecture patterns (circuit breakers, retries, idempotency, event-driven systems)
• Strong understanding of UX patterns that drive engagement and showcase empathy for the user – technical user and end-users
• Leveraging modern practices and agentic workflows to enhance engineering and product outcomes

Operational Maturity

• Experience with on-call rotations and operating production services at scale
• Proficiency with CI/CD pipelines, infrastructure as code, and deployment automation
• Strong testing discipline—experience building comprehensive automated test suites covering unit, integration, and end-to-end scenarios
• Expertise in application instrumentation, monitoring, logging, and observability practices

Problem-Solving & Collaboration

• Excellent analytical and problem-solving skills with ability to navigate ambiguous, complex scenarios
• Customer-focused mindset with experience troubleshooting live issues directly with stakeholders
• Strong communication skills—able to explain technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences
• Comfort working in fast-paced, early-stage environments where you'll wear multiple hats