Backend Engineer

About Overlay

Overlay is on a mission to power every payment made in the UAE whether that's a flat white from a local café or a new pair of sneakers online. We’re a lean team of successful start ups builders from YC-backed companies and leading fintech's, focused on delivering the world’s best payment experiences that are fast, secure, and cost-effective for merchants.

We’re building our product engineering team in Dubai and are looking for hands-on, product-oriented engineers excited to work on meaningful problems and ship at speed.

What You’ll Do

• Design, build, and maintain backend systems using various stacks (eg. Elixir, Java, JavaScript).
• Implement payment APIs, authentication flows, and real-time transaction systems.
• Work on applied cryptography features like PKI and asymmetric encryption for secure payments.
• Collaborate with a tight-knit team to ship features quickly without over-engineering.
• Apply modern AI-assisted development tools (e.g., Claude Code, CodeRabbit) to enhance productivity.
• Contribute to evolving engineering processes — lightweight, async-first, and continuously improving.

What We’re Looking For

• 4+ years of experience building backend systems in production environments.
• Proven experience in fast-paced startup environments, ideally having built a product from scratch.
• Understanding of cryptography, especially PKI and asymmetric encryption.
• Experience with continuous delivery, writing testable code, and deploying frequently.
• Comfort working across multiple languages and tools.
• Exposure to AI development tools (Copilot, Claude, Code Rabbit, etc.) and an interest in pushing their limits.

Nice to Have

• Experience in payments, banking, or high-security transaction systems.
• Contributions to open-source projects.
• DevOps skills (e.g., Terraform, Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines).