Job Description
Punto Pago is a profitable, engineering-led Panamanian fintech that evolved from the country’s largest payments terminal network into a digital ecosystem spanning three verticals: Payments, Fintech, and Marketplace.
Our culture: small senior squads, true ownership and accountability, a bias for shipping resilient systems fast, and a focus on measurable user value over hype.
We’re hiring a Backend Software Engineer (PHP) to own core backend flows end-to-end and deliver measurable impact for hundreds of thousands of users.
What you’ll be doing:
- Build and evolve our core backend systems for payments and fintech: payment processing, CRM business logic, loan origination pipeline, kiosk/terminal backend, operator integrations, and data exports.
- Develop front- and middle-office web apps for CRM and reporting.
- Design solutions end-to-end from data models, API contracts, to resilient, secure architectures.
- Collaborate closely with Business and Mobile development teams to ship features from idea to production.
- Ensure production stability by triaging incidents, fixing bugs quickly, preventing regressions, and monitoring KPIs with actionable alerts.
- Optimize performance under load: SQL tuning, PHP/Node.js profiling, and effective caching.
- Configure monitoring and alerting for key stability and performance metrics.
- Participate in code reviews and architecture discussions, ensuring clean code, secure development, and fintech-grade data protection.
- Work side-by-side with the platform’s original author; expect direct, high-bar feedback and data-driven decisions.
What you’ll need:
- 5+ years of commercial PHP development (8.0+ preferred).
- Strong MySQL: transactions, indexing, query plans, locking/concurrency.
- Practical web stack - JavaScript/jQuery, HTML/CSS, Smarty (or similar templating).
- Composer, package/dependency management, structured project setup.
- Caching & sessions with Memcached (invalidation strategies, TTL, hit-ratio awareness).
- Comfort with Linux/Unix operations and Git/GitLab workflows.
- Proven end-to-end ownership - from design to release and production monitoring.
- Commitment to clean, secure, maintainable code with proper testing.
- Ownership mindset, adaptability, proactive communication, a collaborative approach, comfortable with candid feedback and evolving mature systems.
- English proficiency for professional communication.
Nice to have
- Working knowledge of Node.js for utilities/scripts and small services
- Practical MongoDB experience.
- Experience with C# / WPF.
- Secure development for fintech.
- DS/ML model integration in production.
- Performance and memory tuning skills.
- Experience with unit/integration/API testing and automation.
- Knowledge of CI/CD pipelines.
- Background in financial services.
- Spanish or Russian language skills.
What we offer:
- Competitive salary + annual bonus (discussed post-interview).
- Apple equipment (or equivalent) provided.
- 28 calendar days of vacation + 6 sick leave days annually.
- Hybrid/office in Panama or fully remote.
- Preferred hours: 8-9am → 5-6pm (Panama Time).
Relocation support to Panama.