Founding Backend Engineer — Node.js + Go (Payments)

Location: Manesar, Haryana, in person

Employment: Full-time

About Wnted

Wnted is building a save-now-buy-later platform that helps people fund the things they want before purchasing them, without taking on BNPL debt.

Users can save toward any product, automate contributions, track prices and availability, and redeem their funds when they are ready to buy. Underneath that simple experience is a serious financial backend involving money movement, recurring transfers, webhooks, reconciliation, rewards, gift-card fulfillment, and financial records that must remain correct under concurrency and failure.

We are moving from private beta toward public scale and are hiring a senior, hands-on backend engineer to become one of the technical owners of the company.

The Role

As a Founding Backend Engineer, you will own backend architecture and execution across both Node.js/TypeScript and Go. This is not a role where one language can be delegated to someone else.

You will work directly with the founders and early engineering team to build systems that are secure, observable, financially correct, and capable of scaling well beyond our traffic today.

You will be expected to make architecture decisions, write and review production code, operate what you build, and push back when a proposed shortcut creates unacceptable financial, security, or reliability risk.

What You Will Own

- Design, build, and operate services across Node.js, Express, TypeScript, and Go.
- Build financially correct flows for deposits, purchases, rewards, refunds, webhooks, and reconciliation.
- Establish clear idempotency, ledger, retry, and failure-recovery patterns.
- Own PostgreSQL schema design, transactions, constraints, migrations, query performance, and concurrency behavior.
- Plan safe online migrations for live tables without unnecessary downtime.
- Improve our Docker builds, cloud deployments, logging, metrics, alerts, and incident response.
- Diagnose production issues from application logs, database behavior, infrastructure metrics, and Linux systems.
- Strengthen webhook verification, secrets management, replay protection, sensitive-data logging rules, and defenses against issues such as SSRF.
- Review pull requests seriously and raise the engineering standard of the team.
- Use tools such as Sentry, CodeRabbit, and Copilot review as helpful inputs—not as substitutes for engineering judgment.
- Write down important decisions and take on-call responsibility for the systems you build.
- Work closely with the founders to balance shipping speed against financial and security risk.

What We NeedProduction experience in both Node.js and Go You have built and operated real production systems using:
- Node.js, Express, and TypeScript
- Prisma or an equivalent ORM, including real schema migrations
- Go with frameworks or libraries such as Fiber, Gin, chi, pgx, or sqlc

Tutorial projects or surface-level exposure to one of the two ecosystems will not be enough.

Strong PostgreSQL fundamentals

You can reason clearly about:




- Transactions and isolation levels
- Race conditions and concurrent writes
- Unique constraints as the final source of truth
- Safe migrations on hot tables
- Indexes and query plans
- Keyset pagination
- Raw SQL when an ORM is not the right tool

Real operational ownership You have deployed and operated containerized services on GCP or AWS using systems such as Cloud Run, ECS, or Kubernetes.

You can own a Docker build, work comfortably on a Linux machine, investigate logs and metrics during an incident, and follow a problem through to resolution. You have not only written code that someone else deployed and operated.

Experience where correctness mattered

You have personally operated either:

- A system handling thousands of requests per second, or
- A money-moving system where concurrency and correctness had real consequences

Be prepared to quantify the scale and explain a production incident you personally diagnosed and resolved. Payments or financial-systems thinking

You understand

- Idempotency
- At-least-once webhook delivery
- Unknown payment states
- Reconciliation
- Ledger or double-entry thinking
- Safe retries
- Integer or decimal representations for money

Direct experience with Stripe, Braintree, ACH, card processing, banking infrastructure, or another PSP is strongly preferred.

Security instinct

You have implemented controls such as HMAC verification, replay protection, secure secret handling, and sensitive-data logging restrictions. You understand SSRF and related backend risks, and you have personally fixed security vulnerabilities in production.

Product-startup experience

You have spent at least two to three years inside a product startup, owning systems beyond initial delivery. You can make an architecture decision end to end, explain its tradeoffs, and challenge founders or teammates when necessary.

Agency or consulting experience can be relevant, but only if it included continued production ownership after handoff.

Nice to Have

- Redis, queues, or Google Cloud Tasks
- Fastify
- Recommendation systems, embeddings, or pgvector
- Expo push notifications or production email pipelines
- Scraping and anti-bot experience
- KYC or AML exposure
- Prometheus and Grafana
- PCI-related experience

What Will Not Work in This Role This role is unlikely to be a fit if:
- You use floating-point values for money.
- You rely entirely on an ORM and cannot write or analyze SQL.
- You have never personally deployed or operated your work.
- Your experience ends when a client project is handed over.
- You cannot describe a meaningful production incident you personally resolved.
- You want to work exclusively in either Node.js or Go.




- You do not want ownership of production support and on-call responsibilities.

How We Interview Our interview process focuses on real production judgment rather than trivia:
- Founder conversation and initial technical screening
- Deep dive into a system and production incident you personally owned
- Backend architecture, payments, PostgreSQL, security, and concurrency discussion
- Practical code or system-review exercise
- In-person working session with the team

We will ask you to reason through ambiguous payment states, retries, database races, migrations, and incidents. We care as much about the questions you ask as the solution you propose.

Why Join Wnted

- Become an early technical owner, not a ticket taker.
- Build financial infrastructure whose correctness directly affects customers.
- Influence architecture, engineering practices, security, and hiring from the beginning.
- Work directly with the founders in person.
- Receive meaningful equity and help shape a product before public scale.

To apply, send your résumé or LinkedIn profile, GitHub or technical work if available, and a short note describing:
- A Node.js/TypeScript system and a Go system you personally shipped
- The largest-scale or highest-stakes production system you operated
- A production incident you personally resolved
- Why you want to build Wnted

Pay: ₹336,373.57 - ₹1,631,850.33 per year

Application Question(s)

- This is a full-time, in-person position in Manesar, Haryana. Are you willing and able to work from our Manesar office?
- Do you have at least two years of experience inside a product startup or product company, with responsibility for deployments, maintenance, production incidents, or on-call support? (explain in 100 words)
- Describe the highest-scale or highest-stakes production system you personally operated.

Include the peak requests per second, daily transaction volume, or amount of money processed. Then describe one production incident you personally diagnosed and resolved: how it was detected, the root cause, the immediate fix, and what you changed to prevent it from happening again. (120 words max)
- Describe the most challenging migration you personally performed on a live PostgreSQL table.

Include the approximate table size and traffic, what schema or data change was required, the risk of blocking writes or causing downtime, how you rolled it out safely, and your rollback plan. (120 words max)
- Describe a payment, ledger, webhook, or reconciliation flow that you personally designed or operated.

Include: The payment provider or banking system involved

How idempotency was enforced

How duplicate or delayed webhooks were handled

How unknown or inconsistent payment states were reconciled

One failure mode you encountered

- What is your current CTC?
- What is your expected CTC?
- How many days of notice period do you have? Is it negotiable?

Experience:
- Golang: 1 year (Required)
- Node.js: 1 year (Required)
- Payments Engineering: 1 year (Required)
- PostgreSQL: 1 year (Required)

Work Location: In person

📌 Founding Backend Engineer — Node.js + Go (Payments) (Manesar)
🏢 Centscape
📍 Manesar