Backend Engineer, Financial Infrastructure

About the Company Opportunity is not evenly distributed. Shopify puts independence within reach for anyone with a dream to start a business. We propel entrepreneurs and enterprises to scale the heights of their potential. Since 2006, we've grown to over 8,300 employees and generated over $1 trillion in sales for millions of merchants in 175 countries. This is life-defining work that directly impacts people's lives as much as it transforms your own. This is putting the power of the few in the hands of the many, is a future with more voices rather than fewer, and is creating more choices instead of an elite option. Moving at our pace brings a lot of change, complexity, and ambiguity—and a little bit of chaos. Shopifolk thrive on that and are comfortable being uncomfortable. That means Shopify is not the right place for everyone. Key Responsibilities Design, build, and operate highly reliable, scalable distributed systems that handle money movement at Shopify Build and maintain financial infrastructure that keeps money movement accurate, reconciled, and trustworthy Work in Ruby on Rails within Shopify's core platform, and in Go for new services Partner closely with payments, commerce, finance, and data teams across Shopify Collaborate effectively with external partners and providers across global time zones Own ambiguous, high-impact problems end to end, from shaping the approach to delivering production-ready systems Bring a merchant-first mindset to the work and help define not just how systems are built, but what should be built Participate in an incident response on-call rotation Use AI tools to accelerate engineering workflows, proof of concept, and raise the quality of day-to-day development Qualifications Strong backend engineering experience, with depth in distributed systems, service design, and production operations A track record of designing, building, and operating highly reliable, scalable systems, that require strong guarantees around consistency, fault tolerance, idempotency, recovery, or data integrity Comfort navigating ambiguity, shaping loosely defined problems, and driving work forward with a high degree of ownership Excellent written communication skills and comfort collaborating asynchronously across time zones Strong system design and problem-solving skills, with the judgment to make thoughtful trade-offs between correctness, complexity, performance, and delivery speed Proficiency in a backend language such as Ruby and/or Go (Shopify hires for strong engineering fundamentals, not a specific stack) A collaborative approach to working across multiple internal teams and external partners Willingness to occasionally join meetings or calls outside standard hours to overlap with global teams Nice to Have Experience with payments, fintech, or other financial systems Familiarity with money-movement systems, ledgers, or accounting primitives Exposure to cross-border or international commerce duties, taxes, FX, or compliance Hands-on experience with Ruby on Rails and/or Go Experience operating production systems and participating in on-call Culture & Expectations Before you apply, consider if you can: Care deeply about what you do and about making commerce better for everyone Excel by seeking professional and personal hypergrowth Keep up with an unrelenting pace (the week, not the quarter) Be resilient and resourceful in face of ambiguity and thrive on (rather than endure) change Bring critical thought and opinion Put AI agents and tools to work on the tasks they're built for, and focus on the work only humans can do Embrace differences and disagreement to get shit done and move forward Work digital-first for your daily work Screening & Selection Process Shopify may use AI-enabled tools to screen, select, and assess applications. All AI outputs are reviewed and validated by the recruitment team.