The posting
Papaya is a leading skill-based mobile gaming company, bringing together fun, competition, and real rewards for millions of players worldwide.
Driven by our vision to create one of the world’s most exciting player communities, we develop games powered by a large-scale B2C platform that supports tens of millions of daily tournaments and connects players around the world through social competitions.
Located in the heart of Warsaw, we offer a fast-moving environment, a culture of innovation, professional growth, and the opportunity to make a true impact.
Typhoon is the Payments & Fraud team in Papaya's Core R&D group, and it sits on the most critical path in the company: every deposit, withdrawal, and prize payout across all of Papaya's games runs through systems we build and operate.
What we own:
- The payments platform: integrations with payment providers, and the deposit and withdrawal flows behind every transaction.
- Fraud prevention: real-time detection and controls that stop fraud before it reaches our players or our business.
- Security and reliability: keeping money movement secure, auditable, and always on.
When Typhoon gets it right, players trust us with their money and the business can grow. We partner closely with Product, BI and Client (Unity), and we lead the way in AI-native development.
You'll head Typhoon as a seasoned engineering leader who has taken teams through scale before. You'll raise the bar on architecture, reliability, and delivery, grow strong engineers into technical leaders, and make Typhoon an AI-native team that also brings AI into fraud detection and payment operations.
Responsibilities
- Lead, grow, and hire a team of senior backend engineers.
- Set a high bar and build a culture of ownership, accountability, and execution excellence.
- Set the technical vision and roadmap for the payments and fraud-prevention platform, together with Product, BI, and Client (Unity).
- Drive the architecture decisions that carry the platform through its next stage of growth.
- Own business-critical systems end-to-end, with the reliability, security, and auditability that moving money demands.
- Stay hands-on in design, code review, and the most critical code paths.
- Lead incident response and post-mortems so every production issue leaves the system stronger.
- Make the team AI-native: build AI tools and agents into daily work, from design and coding to review and incident investigation, and measure the impact on speed and quality.
- Explore and apply AI and machine learning to fraud detection, risk scoring, and payment operations.
- Tech stack: AWS, Kubernetes, Node.js, TypeScript, Redis, MySQL
Requirements
- 3+ years leading backend engineering teams, including hiring and growing engineers.
- A track record of taking a team to a higher level of delivery and quality.
- 8+ years as a software engineer with a deep backend background.
- Proven experience designing and operating real-time, high-scale distributed systems.
- Ownership of business-critical production systems where correctness, security, and uptime are non-negotiable.
- Strong hands-on experience with a major cloud provider (AWS preferred).
- Solid grasp of data modeling and caching (MySQL, Redis).
- B.Sc. in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related field.
- Excellent communication skills in English, and the ability to earn trust with engineers, product, and senior stakeholders.
- Hands-on, heavy use of AI tools and agents in real production work, not just autocomplete. You know how to break down tasks, give an agent context and verify its output, and you've led a team's adoption of AI tooling.
Advantages
- Experience with payments, fintech, or fraud-prevention systems.
- Experience applying machine learning or large language models to fraud or risk problems.
- Background in mobile gaming or large-scale B2C mobile platforms.
- Data-driven product work: A/B tests, BI, SQL analytics (e.g., Snowflake).
