Senior Backend Engineer (Payments)

Join Proton and build a better internet where privacy is the default.

Proton was founded in 2014 by scientists from CERN on a simple truth: privacy is a fundamental human right. Since then, we’ve built the world’s largest encrypted email service (Proton Mail) and expanded into Proton VPN, Proton Drive, Proton Pass, and Proton Calendar—tools used by millions globally to protect their freedom, fight censorship, and keep their data safe. In some situations, Proton has literally helped save lives!

We are profitable, independent (no VC control), and selectively hire from the top 1% of applicants. Our 500+ team members across 50+ countries come from leading organizations and elite academic backgrounds. We move fast, keep hierarchy light, and prioritize impact over optics. If you want to do meaningful work with exceptionally high-caliber people, this is it. Join us and do work you can truly be proud of.

The Payments Team

The goal of the Payments team is to enable revenue generation for the entire Proton ecosystem. This comes in the form of introducing new payment methods for users to architecting our client libraries. This team has impact across all of Proton's products and is critical to the success of the business as a whole.

As Proton is a global Company, the Payments Team works to continuously expand the possibilities for users to pay with various payment methods, beyond just plain credit cards or Paypal.

The team works in tight collaboration with the Account Team (responsible for the Proton user lifecycle), the Proton Finance team, and every single Business Unit to ensure that plans, promotions and pricing meet user expectations.

The mission of the team is to empower anyone in the world who wish to use Proton services, to become a Proton subscriber by building enticing interfaces, being able to progressively reach global markets, by providing the methods and tooling allowing users to pay, and for the Proton organization to properly being able to measure growth, and to follow the relative financial regulations.

Tech Stack and Tools

Differently than many other stacks at Proton, the Payments stack depends largely on external services such as payment providers, tax-information providers, currency-conversion providers. As such it is critical, for the success of the service, to build with resilience.

Internally our backend code is in general based on PHP/Symfony, our frontend is based on React, our mobile code is based on Kotlin (on Android) and on Swift (on iOS), with a growing shared codebase in Rust.

All our client-code is open-source and GPL3.

We are migrating our infrastructure to Kubernetes.

Everything runs on premise in Proton's data-centers.

To organize our work we use classic tools such as Jira and Confluence.

Future Plans

With payments being the backbone of any subscription business, we have ambitious plans to expand the team to cover a wide breadth of topics ranging from demystifying payment performance data across regions/products, to thinking about the holistic strategy of product catalogs, and everything in between. This particular team requires someone who is a strong generalist, who thrives with ambiguity. There's huge potential for growth no matter the domain, and the outcome for any candidate is an in-depth view into how money moves globally.

What You Will Do

• Build features in all of Proton's products.
• Close interactions with products and engineers across the company.
• Build scalable software architecture through software engineering best practices.
• Optimise user experience and design.

Job Requirements

• Proven experience with back-end development.
• Expertise in building scalable, high-performance solutions.
• Proficiency with profiling techniques and performance optimization tools.
• Experience leading a team initiative from discovery to production.
• Strong understanding of SQL (MySQL preferred) and data modeling best practices.
• Familiarity with Redis or other caching mechanisms.