SumUp

Backend engineer in identity verification

In short

Senior backend engineer role at SumUp's Identity Lifecycle Mission, building scalable backend services, APIs, and event-driven workflows for merchant onboarding, identity verification, and KYC/KYB regulatory data collection. The company is a global fintech serving millions of businesses, and the role is based office-first in Berlin. It demands strong experience with Go and Java, distributed systems, event streaming (Kafka), cloud deployment (AWS, Docker, Kubernetes), and a strong ownership mindset for business-critical systems.

About the Role
You'll join one of the teams within SumUp's Identity Lifecycle Mission, working on some of the most critical building blocks behind the merchant journey, from onboarding and identity verification to KYC/KYB, regulatory data collection, and managing customer identity throughout the entire lifecycle.
Responsibilities
•Design, build, and operate scalable backend services, APIs, event-driven workflows, and system integrations.
•Build reusable capabilities that power merchant onboarding, identity verification, and KYC/KYB regulatory data collection.
•Drive reliability and resilience across critical services through better observability, failure handling, incident response, and long-term risk reduction.
•Work primarily with Go, while maintaining and progressively modernising existing services written in Java.
•Evolve domain models and service boundaries while reducing legacy complexity, duplicated logic, and tightly coupled integrations, always with a pragmatic, incremental mindset.
•Own your work end-to-end, from technical design and implementation to rollout and production follow-up.
•Work across team and domain boundaries, turning ambiguous product and regulatory requirements into clear, scalable technical solutions.
•Review code and designs, mentor engineers, and help raise engineering standards across the mission.
Requirements
•Strong professional experience building and operating production backend systems with high business impact.
•Experience working with Go and Java and confidence in maintaining and evolving existing Java services.
•Strong knowledge of API design, distributed systems, asynchronous processing, data modelling, testing, and system design.
•Experience with event streaming platforms such as Kafka and modern observability tools such as Grafana or Honeycomb.
•Experience deploying and operating services in cloud environments such as AWS, ideally with Docker and Kubernetes.
•A strong ownership mindset, with the ability to take complex problems from definition through to production.
•Experience improving the reliability of business-critical systems and turning recurring incidents into lasting engineering improvements.
•Strong communication skills and a collaborative approach to working across Engineering, Product, Compliance, Risk, and Operations.
Nice to have
•Experience in fintech, payments, KYC/KYB, identity verification, or regulatory systems.
•Experience translating regulatory and compliance requirements into clear, scalable engineering solutions, while helping bridge the gap between Compliance and Engineering.
Conditions
•Opportunity to work with SumUppers globally on large-scale fintech products used by millions of businesses worldwide, from the Berlin office. This involves an office-first setup.
•Hack Days every second Friday, and entire global Hack Weeks.
•Commitment to Diversity and Inclusion.
•A dedicated annual L&D budget of €2,000 for attending conferences and/or advancing your career through further education.
•Enrolment onto the VSOP program: own a stake in SumUp's future success.
•A corporate pension scheme matching up to 20% of contributions.
•30 Days Sabbatical after completing 3 years of employment with SumUp.
•Referral Bonus for referring talented individuals.
•Numerous other benefits such as Urban Sports Club subsidy, Kita placement assistance, relocation assistance, subsidised office lunches.

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