Backend Engineer – Payments, Tokenization & PCI DSS

Location: Galapa, Atlántico, Colombia (CO)

Experience Level: Intermediate

Description

We are looking for a Backend Engineer specializing in payment infrastructure, tokenization, and secure payment systems to join a technically focused team in Barranquilla.

This is an opportunity for an engineer who enjoys building critical backend infrastructure, where security, reliability, data protection, and system design matter as much as clean code.

You will work on a multi-tenant payment orchestration platform, contributing to payment vault and tokenization infrastructure, payment methods, merchant management, gateway integrations, and secure payment processing workflows.

If you have hands-on experience with Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, payment gateways, tokenization, PCI DSS, APIs, and secure backend architecture, we want to hear from you.

What You'll Do

• Design and implement payment vault and tokenization integrations.
• Build secure workflows for collecting payment methods, tokenizing, and processing.
• Develop and maintain infrastructure for merchants, gateway accounts, credentials, payment methods, and transactions.
• Integrate and manage multiple merchant configurations with payment gateways.
• Work with payment gateway integrations, including NMI.
• Support secure payment method usage and routing across authorized merchants.
• Design and maintain REST APIs and PostgreSQL data models.
• Build backend services supporting merchants, payment methods, tokens, gateway configurations, and transaction lifecycles.
• Implement secure management of API keys, gateway credentials, secrets, and other sensitive information.
• Ensure sensitive payment information is properly protected across databases, logs, monitoring, and application infrastructure.
• Design systems with PCI DSS scope reduction and Cardholder Data Environment (CDE) security in mind.
• Implement reliable payment workflows using idempotency, webhooks, transaction state management, retries, and failure recovery.
• Troubleshoot complex backend and payment integration issues.
• Contribute to scalable, secure, and maintainable backend architecture.

What You'll Work On

This role sits close to the core of the payment platform.

You will help build and evolve infrastructure responsible for vaulting, tokenization, payment methods, merchant configurations, gateway integrations, and secure transaction processing.

We are looking for someone who understands what happens beyond the API call.

You should be comfortable thinking about questions such as:

• How should tokenized payment data move through a secure architecture?
• How can payment infrastructure reduce PCI scope?
• How should merchant credentials and payment methods be isolated?
• What happens when a processor times out?
• How do you prevent duplicate transactions?
• How should retries and webhook events be handled?
• How do you protect sensitive payment information from application logs and databases?
• How should a multi-tenant payment system maintain secure data boundaries?

Compensation & Work Arrangement

• $400–$450 USD per week (paid in arrears), depending on experience
• Independent contract position
• On-site in Barranquilla, Colombia

Hiring Process

To ensure fairness and consistency, all applicants must complete every stage of the hiring process.

Our process includes:

1. Resume Review
2. Pre-Screen Questionnaire
3. One-Way Video Interview
4. Live Interviews

Please Note

• English resumes are required for this role
• Strong English communication skills are essential

Requirements

What We're Looking For

• 1+ years of professional backend engineering experience.
• Strong hands-on experience with Node.js and TypeScript.
• Practical experience working with payment systems, payment gateways, tokenization, or payment vault infrastructure.
• Strong understanding of PCI DSS, CDE, tokenization, PCI scope reduction, and secure handling of payment data.
• Strong PostgreSQL experience.
• Experience developing and maintaining REST APIs.
• Experience integrating third-party APIs and services.
• Experience managing credentials, API keys, secrets, and sensitive data securely.
• Understanding of multi-tenant architectures and data isolation.
• Experience with AWS and Docker.
• Experience with secrets management and secure application configuration.
• Understanding of idempotency, webhooks, retries, transaction states, and payment lifecycles.
• Knowledge of authentication, authorization, encryption, and secure software development practices.
• Ability to work independently and take ownership of backend systems.

Nice to Have

Experience with any of the following will be highly valued:

• NMI or similar payment gateways
• Payment vault or tokenization providers
• Multi-merchant payment platforms
• Payment orchestration systems
• PostgreSQL Row-Level Security (RLS)
• 3-D Secure
• Payment reconciliation
• PCI DSS compliance or assessment processes
• Python
• C#/.NET
• Java
• Go
• Additional cloud or infrastructure experience