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.