Backend Engineer

About Themis

Themis is a collaborative governance, risk, and compliance platform helping banks, credit unions, and fintechs streamline oversight, strengthen compliance programs, and move faster with confidence.

Our customers operate in highly regulated environments where strong governance, risk management, and compliance practices are critical. We partner closely with financial institutions and fintechs to help them build scalable, effective oversight programs, strengthen third-party oversight, and navigate an increasingly complex regulatory landscape.

At Themis, we believe great companies are built through partnership, expertise, ownership, and execution. We’re looking for team members who are excited to solve meaningful problems, build trusted relationships, and help shape the future of governance, risk, and compliance.

About the Role

We’re looking for a Backend Engineer to help build and scale the secure, reliable systems that power the Themis governance, risk, and compliance platform.

In this role, you’ll work on a standard modern Rails stack, including Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, and Redis, building the APIs, services, background jobs, and data models behind our product. You’ll solve for the reliability, security, performance, and data integrity that financial institutions and fintechs depend on every day.

The ideal candidate has strong Rails experience, writes robust and well-tested code, thinks carefully about data and edge cases, and takes ownership of the systems they build. You understand that in a regulated domain, correctness, security, and reliability are not afterthoughts. They are part of the product.

Working Hours & Availability

Themis is a remote-first team. Engineering operates with flexible working hours and supports asynchronous work, but all engineers are expected to maintain meaningful daily overlap with our core collaboration hours of approximately 11:00 AM–4:00 PM ET for standups, pairing, code review, and time-sensitive work.

This role participates in a shared on-call rotation and may require availability outside of standard business hours to support production systems and respond to incidents. We aim to keep on-call sustainable through fair rotations and strong tooling.

We support flexibility where possible, but regular or extended blocks of unavailable time during core hours should be discussed and aligned in advance.

What You’ll Do

Build and Scale the Platform

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems on a modern Rails stack

• Work with Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, background jobs, APIs, and service integrations

• Own features end to end, from design and implementation through testing and deployment

• Build secure, reliable APIs and backend workflows that support complex GRC use cases

• Design data models and database structures that prioritize integrity, performance, and long-term maintainability

• Collaborate with frontend engineers to design clean, well-documented APIs

Improve Quality, Reliability, and Architecture

• Write clean, well-tested, maintainable Rails code

• Contribute to architecture decisions as the platform scales

• Identify and address performance bottlenecks, reliability risks, and data integrity issues

• Participate in code reviews and help raise the engineering bar

• Improve backend patterns, tooling, and development practices over time

Support Security, Compliance, and Collaboration

• Apply security and data-handling best practices appropriate to a regulated domain

• Partner with product to translate customer needs into thoughtful technical solutions

• Support audit, compliance, and data-integrity requirements relevant to our customers

• Help maintain systems that customers can trust for critical governance, risk, and compliance workflows

Required Qualifications

• Strong professional experience building production applications with Ruby on Rails or a similar modern backend framework

• Experience working with PostgreSQL or another relational database, including data modeling and query performance

• Experience with Redis, background jobs, caching, queues, or similar backend infrastructure

• Strong experience designing and building APIs

• Experience writing tested, maintainable, production-grade code

• Strong understanding of security, reliability, performance, and data integrity fundamentals

• Ability to own backend systems end to end and manage complexity thoughtfully

• Strong communication skills and comfort working closely with product, frontend, and other engineering team members

Preferred Qualifications

• Deep experience with Ruby on Rails in a production SaaS environment

• Experience scaling Rails applications and improving backend performance

• Experience with background job frameworks, async processing, queues, or event-driven patterns

• Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure

• Experience handling sensitive data and supporting compliance, audit, or security requirements

• Experience in financial services, fintech, GRC, or another regulated domain

• Experience working in a startup or high-growth company

What We Value

The people who thrive at Themis tend to share a common set of characteristics:

Hunger & Ownership

We act like owners. We take initiative, spot gaps, and drive results for both our customers and the company.

Radical Accountability

We own outcomes without blame or excuses. We communicate early, learn from mistakes, and stay focused on solutions.

Problem Solver Mentality

We are builders, not blockers. We bring recommendations, options, and next steps, not just problems.

Mission & Customer Focus

Our customers trust us with critical compliance work. We take that seriously, advocate for their needs, and look for ways to deliver real value.

Low Ego, High Impact

We care more about solving problems than getting credit. We stay collaborative, coachable, and ready to jump in wherever needed.

Adaptability & Resilience

We stay flexible and steady through change. When priorities shift or challenges come up, we keep moving forward.

Curiosity & Continuous Learning

We are excited to learn. We dig into how the product works, investigate issues, use AI and automation thoughtfully, and keep growing into trusted experts.

Why Join Themis?

At Themis, you’ll build the backbone of a platform that financial institutions trust with critical compliance work. You’ll own real systems, influence the architecture, and have a direct impact on reliability and scale as we grow.

If you care about building robust, secure systems and want real ownership at a growing company, we’d love to hear from you.