Why PayNet / Why Now
- Strengthen backend platforms critical to onboarding participants into Malaysia's payment ecosystem
- Scale and stabilize systems as onboarding volumes, complexity, and integration demands increase
- Reduce long-term operational and performance risk through better backend architecture and design
- Own backend decisions that directly affect platform reliability, security, and partner experience
TL;DR
- Design and own backend services that underpin critical participant onboarding platforms
- Build scalable, secure, and high-performance systems used at national scale
- Operate as a self-directed technical owner — identify problems, propose solutions, and drive them to production with minimal handholding
- Set the code review bar and technical delivery standards for the team
- Actively coach junior engineers through their day-to-day work, not just in passing
Why This Role Matters
- Backend systems directly impact the reliability and scalability of national payment onboarding
- Poor architectural decisions create long-term operational risk and rework
- Senior engineers set the technical bar for quality, performance, and security
- Strong backend ownership enables faster delivery without compromising stability
- A senior who can operate independently frees leads/architects to focus on cross-team and strategic problems
What You Will Actually Do
Ownership & Solutioning
- Take a problem statement (not a spec) and independently research, propose, and defend a technical solution — including trade-off analysis, not just implementation
- Design and lead architecture for scalable, high-performance backend systems, from first principles where needed
- Own end-to-end delivery: design → build → test → deploy → post-release stability, with minimal supervision once direction is aligned
- Proactively flag architectural or scalability risks before they become production incidents, rather than waiting to be asked
Engineering
- Develop and maintain backend services and RESTful APIs using Java, Golang, or Python
- Design and optimize database schemas and queries to ensure performance and data integrity
- Write unit and integration tests as a default part of delivery, not an afterthought
- Troubleshoot complex production issues and drive root-cause analysis through to permanent fixes
Code Review & Engineering Practices
- Set and enforce code review standards (PR size, test coverage expectations, security checks, documentation)
- Review peers' and juniors' code with a bias toward teaching — explain the "why," not just flag the "what"
- Champion CI/CD, branching, and release discipline appropriate to a national payment system (audit trail, rollback safety, change management)
- Adapt quickly to the team's existing tooling, workflows, and review culture — able to plug into an established process within the first few weeks rather than needing it re-explained repeatedly
Examples of This Role in Practice
- Given only "onboarding is timing out under load," independently profiles the system, identifies the bottleneck, and ships a fix — without needing the root cause pre-diagnosed for them
- Refactoring database queries to remove performance bottlenecks before they're flagged by monitoring
- Leading code reviews that catch security or reliability issues before merge, and using the review as a teaching moment for the author
- Owning a critical production incident end-to-end: triage, root cause analysis, fix, and postmortem write-up
- Spending 3–5 hours a week (not just "when there's time") on pairing or reviewing with junior engineers
- Adapting within the first sprint or two to the team's existing Git workflow, review cadence, and definition-of-done — asking sharp clarifying questions rather than needing repeated onboarding
Required
What Will Help You Succeed
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience, with strong proficiency in Java/Spring Boot (Golang or Python a plus)
- Proven track record of end-to-end ownership: design, troubleshooting, structured problem analysis, and unit testing
- Proven experience building RESTful APIs and scalable backend systems
- Solid understanding of relational databases, SQL, and performance optimization
- Strong, structured problem-solving ability — can walk through how they diagnose an issue, not just state the fix
- Experience mentoring engineers in a hands-on, ongoing capacity, and working in Agile environments
Helpful
- Experience across multiple backend languages or frameworks (e.g., Golang, Node.js)
- Exposure to microservices and distributed systems architecture (event-driven design, sagas, service boundaries)
- Experience integrating third-party APIs and external services
- Familiarity with CI/CD pipelines and deployment automation
- Knowledge of backend security best practices (authentication, authorization, data protection) especially relevant in a payments context
- Experience with monitoring, logging, and performance tuning tools
- Prior experience in fintech, payments, or other regulated/high-availability environments