Backend Engineer (Chat/Wallet)

About Us

Vama is revolutionizing digital communication by combining secure messaging and instant payments into one seamless platform. Often called the "WeChat of the West," we're building the future where users can chat, send money, split bills, and manage communities, all without switching between apps.

Founded in 2022 and headquartered in Santa Monica, California, Vama addresses the $100+ billion market opportunity at the intersection of messaging and real-time payments. We've recently raised $8.25M and are targeting 1 million Monthly Active Users in our first year, scaling to 5 million users within 3 years.

Role Overview:

• We are seeking a talented Junior/Mid-Level Backend Engineer to join our growing team as we scale our revolutionary chat and payment platform.
• As a backend engineer at Vama, you'll contribute to systems that handle millions of messages and payment transactions, working on everything from our real-time messaging infrastructure to our payment processing systems.
• If you're excited about building scalable systems that combine social communication with fintech innovation, we want to hear from you.

Key Responsibilities:

• Work with the team to implement backend services using Golang and other relevant technologies
• Work with databases such as PostgreSQL, focusing on efficient data storage and retrieval
• Assist in implementing messaging solutions for communication between microservices
• Work with caching systems like Redis to improve data access performance
• Help maintain, monitor and troubleshoot system performance using monitoring tools
• Contribute to cloud-based solutions on GCP
• Write clear API documentation and learn API design best practices
• Be on-call for emergencies
• Collaborate with front-end developers to integrate user-facing features
• Write unit tests to ensure the reliability of developed features

Minimum Requirements:

• 1+ years of industry software engineering experience
• Strong coding skills in any 1 programming language, but willing to work in Go
• Basic Golang proficiency (even if just a weekend of self-study - we'll test basic Go knowledge in the interview)
• Good understanding of relational databases and SQL
• Strong collaboration and communication skills and ability to work across teams to contribute to your peers' success
• Ability to thrive with a high level of autonomy and responsibility
• Interest in working as a generalist across varying technologies and stacks to solve problems
• Comfort with command line and basic Unix/Linux systems

Preferred Qualifications:

• 1+ year experience with Golang
• Some exposure to cloud platforms (GCP preferred)
• Experience with ConnectRPC, gRPC
• Experience with Docker, Kubernetes
• Some experience in distributed systems, caching, and performance optimization

Tech Stack

• Golang
• PostgreSQL
• Redis
• Docker
• ConnectRPC/gRPC
• Pub/Sub
• Interview Process
• Compensation will be commensurate with experience and qualifications
• LiveKit
• GCP Monitoring
• Kubernetes GKE