Staff Software Engineer (Payments)

About the team

Breakneck Studio – an incubator and accelerator scaling digital and e-commerce brands at high velocity. It's home to our Co-Found program, where ambitious founders take products from zero to market in months, not years. This is where you get hands-on, zero-to-scale experience you won't find in a regular job.

We are a fast-scaling travel startup with strong product-market fit, a generational traveltech company looking to disturb this sleepy industry. We are two-sided: travelers get a consumer product that helps them plan and book trips, and advisors get a SaaS-style subscription with certification and qualified leads in the offer.

We are looking

We’re looking for the first developers to join a fast-growing travel startup that’s already found strong product-market fit and is now ready to scale.

This is not a role for someone who wants to manage agencies, coordinate stakeholders, or spend weeks building presentations. We’re looking for a builder – someone who can design a schema for breakfast, build a sandbox environment for lunch, load test it before dinner, and wake up excited to get it ready for prod the upcoming week.

You’ll work directly with the founder and early team, own growth from day one, and help shape what the product looks like as the company scales. Work-life balance can look different in a fast-moving company that’s on a mission to make a real impact.

About the role
You'll lead the move of our platform onto AWS and own the infrastructure and backend foundations it runs on. A big part of this role is building bulletproof background processing: queues and workers that never lose state (since they are part of our payment system), recover cleanly from failure, and scale with demand. Our current stack is TypeScript, Supabase (PostgreSQL), and TanStack, with a PHP/Laravel backend migration planned to AWS.

Get ready to

• Lead the migration of our platform to AWS, from planning the architecture to executing the cutover with minimal downtime.

• Own the migration of our PHP/Laravel backend to AWS, deciding what moves as-is and what gets re-architected along the way.

• Design and build background processing for our payment flows: queues and workers that never lose state, handle retries and idempotency correctly, and recover cleanly from failure.

• Make sure every job and transaction is traceable and auditable, so nothing goes missing between systems.

• Build infrastructure that scales with demand, including autoscaling workers, managing load spikes, and keeping costs under control as we grow.

• Set up infrastructure as code, CI/CD pipelines, and environments (dev, staging, prod) that let the team ship quickly and safely.

• Put monitoring, logging, and alerting in place so problems are caught early and diagnosed fast.

• Own security and reliability across the infrastructure, including access control, secrets management, backups, and disaster recovery.

• Strengthen the backend foundations of our TypeScript, Supabase (PostgreSQL), and TanStack stack so it can support production scale.

• Work directly with the founder and early team on infrastructure decisions that affect the product, and set the standards future engineers will build on.

We expect you to

• Strong software engineering fundamentals, with deep experience in Platform / Cloud Engineering (AWS) and Backend Software Engineering (PHP, Laravel, PostgreSQL).

• Deep, hands-on AWS expertise, especially SQS (standard and FIFO, visibility timeouts, DLQs), S3 (lifecycle policies, access control, presigned URLs, event notifications), and related services such as Lambda, ECS/Fargate, IAM, EventBridge and CloudWatch.

• Production experience with PHP and Laravel, including Laravel Queues, Horizon or equivalent, and designing backend services on PostgreSQL.

• Proven track record building highly reliable worker and queue systems: retry strategies with exponential backoff, idempotent job design, exactly-once or effectively-once processing, dead-letter queues, and state handling that survives crashes, deploys and partial failures.

• Experience planning and delivering complex platform migrations with minimal downtime, ideally including moving from a managed platform such as Supabase to self-managed AWS infrastructure.

• Strong Infrastructure as Code experience with Terraform, AWS CDK or Pulumi, plus CI/CD pipeline design.

• Strong understanding of observability and operational excellence: metrics, logging, tracing, alerting and incident response, using tools such as Datadog.

• Solid understanding of modern authentication and identity concepts (OAuth2, OIDC, SAML) and cloud security best practices, including IAM least privilege and secrets management.

• TypeScript experience is an advantage, as it is the team's primary development language.

• Comfortable in an agile, collaborative environment and communicating effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.

• Experience leading technical initiatives, influencing architectural decisions or providing technical leadership across teams.
  

Salary

Gross salary range is 6000-8000 EUR/month + stock options (ESOP) depending on your experience.

Location

We have several great workspaces to choose from, including our headquarters in Vilnius and our hubs in Klaipėda and Riga.

For our Vilnius office, we follow a 4 days onsite, 1 day remote hybrid model. For roles based outside Vilnius, the work arrangement -onsite, hybrid, or remote-depends on the specific position.

Speaking of perks:

Own your wellness
Stay sharp and well in your own way – health insurance (after probation), on-site physiotherapist, office gym, and fitness classes keep you moving. Plus 7 extra days off, 3 for weddings, hybrid work, and the freedom to work 2 months from anywhere in the world.

Boost your daily life
Every breakthrough needs a spark and our daily setup reflects that. Pet-friendly office, fresh breakfasts, hot lunches, drawers and fridges stocked with snacks and food – for a quick bite or even a team-cooked meal together. Rooftop and cellar events keep things lively, while 10 social clubs give space to dive into passions and try new things. Add a public transport card for Vilnius and Perks.lt perks for smoother days.

Shape your growth path
Builders never stop learning. Coaching, mentorship, training, conferences, online courses, subscriptions, books – you’ve got a €1000 yearly budget to fuel personal or team growth. You pick the path – we’ll back you all the way.

Drive global impact
This is where ambition scales. Build impact across 30+ brands worldwide. Launch bold projects. Even step in as a co-founder – we reward those who push further. And if you bring in more great people, you get €1500 for every successful referral.

*additional conditions apply based on your residence location.