Founding Backend Engineer (Java)

About Grand

Grand is the first purpose-built fintech for the B2B economy.

We’ve raised over $5m to build the most intelligent fintech platform for businesses that operate in the built world.

Our first product, Grand Profile, helps businesses understand whom they extend credit to, payment terms, unsecured loans, etc. – surfacing early signals of risk and growth so they can act sooner.

Over time, this trust network becomes the foundation for an intelligent payment network where businesses can extend credit, move money, and transact with confidence.

Grand is founded and funded by a group of entrepreneurs, investors and researchers who've built, sold, worked in, and invested in global fintech, commerce, and AI companies, including Mastercard Labs, Stripe, Shopify, Airwallex, American Express, WhenThen, Lovable, and others.

The Role

We're hiring a Founding Backend Engineer (Java) to design, build, and operate the backend systems that power Grand.

This is a hands-on individual contributor role for someone who enjoys owning problems end-to-end. You'll design APIs, model data, build event-driven services, and ingest signals from external sources — turning raw data into the product surface that customers actually use.

This is a product-focused engineering role, and at Grand you are your own product manager. You'll work alongside founders, designers, AI engineers, and other product engineers — shaping what gets built, not just how. Your primary responsibility is shipping backend systems that are reliable, secure, well-designed, and production-ready.

This is a 0→1 environment, where you help define how Grand feels, behaves, and earns trust from day one.

What You’ll Do

• Design and build Java services and APIs that power Grand and the customer-facing product

• Model the data that powers our product — turning messy external signals into a coherent product surface

• Build event-driven pipelines that ingest, transform, and enrich data from external sources

• Operate production systems with a security-first mindset — regulated data, audit, compliance

• Design APIs and data models that hold up under real distributed concerns: latency, retries, idempotency, partial failure

• Build search, indexing, and query systems at scale

• Integrate AI capabilities into backend workflows where they make the product meaningfully better

• Make product decisions on what to build and how, in collaboration with founders and other engineers

• Use AI-assisted development tools to accelerate coding, testing, and refactoring

• Own features through their full lifecycle, from idea → production → iteration

Must Have

• Strong backend experience building production systems in Java with a modern framework (Micronaut, Spring Boot, Quarkus or similar)

• Experience designing APIs, modelling data, and reasoning about distributed concerns (latency, retries, idempotency, failure handling)

• Experience shipping and operating software in AWS-based production environments

• Experience with event-driven or message-based architectures in production

• Experience building products in fintech, payments, credit, identity, KYB, or another regulated/financial environment

• Security, data-protection, and compliance awareness when building production systems

• Familiarity with CI/CD workflows

• Experience working in startup or 0→1 environments

• AI-first mindset, using modern tools to increase velocity responsibly

Nice to Have

• GraphQL in production (AppSync a bonus)

• Search and indexing experience (OpenSearch, Elasticsearch, or similar)

• Data ingestion and ETL at scale, particularly from third-party feeds or APIs

• Serverless experience (AWS Lambda, Step Functions, EventBridge)

• Real-time features in production (WebSockets, server-sent events, event streams)

• Infrastructure-as-code (Pulumi, Terraform, CDK)

• Experience integrating with AI/ML systems in cloud-native environments

Salary and Benefits

• Excellent Salary: Competitive and reflective of impact and responsibility

• Equity: Meaningful ownership in a long-term company

• Hybrid Work: At least 3 days in our Dublin office, with extended remote on request — outcomes matter more than optics

• Health Insurance & Pension: Comprehensive cover

• Holidays: Generous holiday allowance

• Equipment: High-end spec laptop and setup of your choice

Who You Are

You want to build a company, not just code at one. You're a product-minded engineer with a startup mindset, comfortable operating in a 0→1 environment, making progress with imperfect information and taking responsibility for outcomes. You have a bias toward shipping real value, not ceremony or over-engineering.

You enjoy building systems that businesses actually rely on — the kind where reliability, correctness, and trust really matter. You care about how data flows, how APIs behave under load, and how messy real-world inputs get turned into clean product surface. Bonus points if you've worked with credit bureau data, business registries, or KYB/KYC feeds before and found that kind of messy third-party data interesting rather than painful.

You care about reliability, performance, and clarity across the stack, not just getting something working once. You're a clear communicator who can reason about trade-offs and constraints with founders, designers, and other engineers.