Staff Software Engineer (Payments)

Location: Vilnius, Lithuania, with a 4 days onsite and 1 day remote hybrid model. Workspaces are also available in Klaipėda and Riga; arrangements outside Vilnius depend on the position.

Salary: €6,000–€8,000 gross per month, plus stock options (ESOP), depending on experience.

Company

Breakneck Studio is an incubator and accelerator scaling digital and e-commerce brands, including a fast-growing travel startup with consumer trip-planning products and a SaaS-style subscription platform for travel advisors.

What you will do

• Lead the platform migration to AWS, from architecture planning through a low-downtime cutover.
• Own the PHP/Laravel backend migration and decide which components should be migrated or re-architected.
• Design reliable payment queues and workers with retries, idempotency, failure recovery, and durable state handling.
• Build scalable infrastructure with autoscaling, load-spike management, infrastructure as code, and CI/CD environments.
• Implement monitoring, logging, tracing, alerting, access control, secrets management, backups, and disaster recovery.
• Work with the founder and early team on backend architecture, infrastructure standards, and technical initiatives.

Requirements

• Deep hands-on experience with platform or cloud engineering on AWS and backend engineering with PHP, Laravel, and PostgreSQL.
• Strong AWS expertise, including SQS, S3, Lambda, ECS/Fargate, IAM, EventBridge, and CloudWatch.
• Production experience with Laravel Queues, Horizon or equivalent, and reliable worker and queue systems.
• Experience with retry strategies, exponential backoff, idempotent processing, dead-letter queues, and failure-resistant state handling.
• Experience delivering complex platform migrations, Infrastructure as Code with Terraform, AWS CDK, or Pulumi, and CI/CD pipelines.
• Strong knowledge of observability, incident response, OAuth2, OIDC, SAML, cloud security, and IAM least privilege.

Nice to have

• TypeScript experience.
• Experience migrating from a managed platform such as Supabase to self-managed AWS infrastructure.

Culture & Benefits

• Work directly with the founder and early team in a fast-moving, agile environment.
• Hybrid work, with the option to work from anywhere in the world for up to two months.
• Health insurance after probation, an onsite physiotherapist, office gym, fitness classes, and seven additional days off.
• Pet-friendly offices with breakfasts, lunches, snacks, social clubs, and team events.
• €1,000 annual learning and development budget for coaching, training, conferences, courses, subscriptions, and books.
• Opportunity to build products across more than 30 brands and participate in co-founder initiatives.