Senior Backend Engineer (Go)

We're building the South African payroll platform we wished existed — one that does the maths and the paperwork brilliantly and stays out of the way for the rest of the month. The product is API-first, POPIA-aligned, and runs on the live SARS 2026/27 tax tables.

This is a founding-team hire. We're more interested in taste, judgment and the things you've shipped than in years on a CV. If you write the kind of Go that an oncall engineer thanks you for at 02:00, we want to talk.

• Own significant chunks of the Go services that power the tax engine, double-entry ledger, and bank-export pipeline (FNB, Standard Bank, Capitec, Nedbank, Absa, Investec).
• Design APIs that are idempotent by default, signed webhooks that are boring to verify, and integrations that fail safely under load.
• Take features end-to-end: schema, service, tests, observability, runbook, customer comms — the lot.
• Help define how we test financial code. Golden fixtures, property tests, real-database integration tests — no mocked-out happy paths.
• Pair with the founder and the next two engineers on architecture decisions that we'll still be happy with in three years.

• Production Go experience on systems that handle money, billing, or compliance — or systems where correctness was more important than throughput.
• Fluency with Postgres at the query-plan level. You know what a serializable transaction costs and when to reach for it.
• Comfort with the boring infrastructure: migrations, queues, idempotency, retries, timeouts, structured logs, distributed tracing.
• A bias toward small, reversible changes and pull requests a reviewer can actually hold in their head.
• Care for the humans who use the system — engineers, payroll managers, employees who need their salary on the 25th.

• Experience with South African payroll, tax, or financial-services regulation (PAYE, UIF, SDL, EMP201, POPIA, NPS).
• Some Elixir/Phoenix exposure — the legacy of our first backend still informs the new one.
• Open-source work, a long-running side project, or a deep blog you'd want us to read.

• Meaningful equity in an early-stage company solving a problem with a clear, large market.
• A small, senior team — no layers, no committees, no quarterly OKR theatre.
• Cape Town office days with people you'll like; remote-friendly the rest of the week if you're elsewhere in South Africa.
• A real budget for the tools, hardware and books that make your work better.
• A practice of writing things down — design docs, post-incident reviews, careful PR descriptions — so the work compounds.