Senior BE Engineer

About Piñata Piñata helps renters turn their biggest monthly expense into rewards and credit building. We partner with property managers, property management platforms, and strategic partners to bring these benefits to renters at scale. We're hiring a Senior Backend Engineer to build and own the core systems behind rent reporting, rewards, billing, and partner integrations, and to keep the data that renters and partners depend on accurate. About the Role This is a hands-on role for someone who combines strong backend engineering, data rigor, and clear communication. You'll design and ship services across our Python/Django platform and TypeScript services, own complex projects from architecture through release, and work directly with product, data, operations, finance, and partner teams. You should be just as comfortable writing an architecture decision record, building a new service, running a careful data repair in production, and explaining a reconciliation finding to a non-technical stakeholder. Experience with credit reporting, payments, or property-management data integrations is a strong plus. What You'll Own • Core Platform: Design, build, and maintain backend features across our Django platform and TypeScript services, including renter accounts, leases and tenancies, memberships, and rewards. • Billing & Payments: Own billing services that draft invoices, apply contract and usage pricing, and charge customers through Stripe. Build in safeguards such as feature flags, dry runs, and finance sign-off before money moves. • Credit Reporting: Own the systems that report rent payments to the credit bureaus, including the tradeline lifecycle, account transfers between property managers, back-reporting, and dispute handling. Protect the accuracy of every record we send. • Partner Integrations & Data Ingestion: Build and maintain integrations with property-management platforms, including partner APIs, embedded experiences, and SFTP-based rent-roll ingestion. Handle resident matching, identity changes, and edge cases in partner data. • Data Integrity & Production Repairs: Investigate data issues at scale, size their impact with SQL, and design repairs that are transactional, idempotent, and verified. Run them safely in production with dry runs and progress reporting. • Reconciliation & Incident Investigation: Trace partner and customer discrepancies across the database, logs, and monitoring tools. Turn what you find into a clear explanation, specific asks for the partner, and code or process fixes. • Architecture & Delivery: Write architecture decisions and project plans, break the work into epics and tickets, and take it through code review, QA, and UAT to production. • Cross-Functional Partnership: Work with finance, operations, customer care, and partner managers to turn ambiguous business processes into precise requirements. • AI-Assisted Engineering: Use AI coding tools and build internal tooling, such as MCP servers, that help engineers and business teams work faster and more safely. What You'll Bring • 5+ years of backend engineering experience, including owning production systems from design through launch and support. Startup or growth-stage experience is strongly preferred. • Strong Python and Django skills, plus experience building services in TypeScript/Node.js. • Deep SQL and PostgreSQL experience: complex analytical queries, reasoning about transactions, and changing data safely on live systems. • Experience building and integrating APIs, including partner-facing REST APIs, webhooks, authentication, and batch or file-based data exchange. • Payments experience, ideally with Stripe subscriptions, invoicing, and payment methods. • Rigor with data correctness: you size a problem before you fix it, verify results against the database, and know when to hold records back rather than guess. • Excellent written communication, with the ability to explain findings, tradeoffs, and risks clearly to engineers, executives, and partners. • A builder's mentality: you take ownership, document your decisions, raise concerns early, and stay close to the details from planning through production. Experience That Sets You Apart • Credit reporting: Metro 2, tradelines, bureau disputes, or other consumer-credit data under FCRA. • Proptech: property management software, resident and lease data, or rent payments. Familiarity with RealPage, Buildium, AppFolio, or MRI is valuable. • Billing systems: replacing manual invoicing with automated billing, including contract minimums, usage-based pricing, and accounting integrations such as QuickBooks. • Rewards and memberships: points, loyalty, or subscription membership products, including plan migrations. • Observability: using Datadog, Sentry, and AWS tooling to investigate production issues. Who Will Thrive Here You're a backend engineer, a careful data owner, and a clear communicator who likes to build. You can design a new billing service, repair thousands of renter records without leaving anyone half-fixed, and explain exactly what happened to a partner's team. Piñata succeeds when renters can trust their rewards and credit history and partners can trust our data. You bring the judgment to get the details right and the ownership to see the work through.