Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform
Leads architecture and reliability for a global payments and commerce platform, shaping APIs, distributed systems, observability, compliance, and production operations. Requires 10+ years of backend experience, deep Go and distributed-systems expertise, and Staff/Principal-level technical leadership.
About the job
Responsibilities
- Architect and ship multi-tenant, planet-scale commerce services for checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, and tax.
- Own API and schema design, including protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning, deprecation, compatibility, and contract testing.
- Design resilient payment paths using retries, circuit breakers, idempotency, outbox/Saga patterns, graceful degradation, and automated replay.
- Ensure auditability through append-only double-entry ledgers, immutable event streams, trace-linked entities, tamper-evident trails, and reconciliation.
- Establish service catalogs, ownership scorecards, SLOs, runbooks, autoscaling, quotas, and configuration standards.
- Lead observability, production excellence, canary and blue-green deployments, rollback automation, chaos drills, disaster recovery, and incident response.
- Embed security and compliance practices covering PCI scope reduction, tokenization, secrets, KMS, retention, archival, and privacy controls.
- Create developer golden paths, service templates, ADR/RFC processes, contract tests, ephemeral environments, and performance harnesses.
- Lead domain evolution, reliability strategy, data governance, technical reviews, postmortems, hiring, mentoring, and cross-functional planning.
Requirements
- 10+ years building and operating backend systems, including 5+ years with Go and 2–3+ years at Staff/Principal or Tech Lead level.
- Deep experience with protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and Buf.
- Strong distributed systems knowledge, including idempotency, deduplication, outbox patterns, ordering, concurrency control, backpressure, and consensus fundamentals.
- Experience with event-driven architectures on GCP, Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, and ClickHouse.
- Experience operating Kubernetes/GKE at scale, including HPA/VPA, PDBs, resource management, multi-region topologies, CI/CD, and progressive delivery.
- Reliability engineering experience with SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity and load testing, incident management, and disaster recovery/business continuity.
- Knowledge of secrets and KMS practices, PCI fundamentals, data governance, retention, and archival.
- Testing experience across unit, integration, contract, property-based, and performance testing.
- Understanding of Vue.js and TanStack Query for effective frontend/API collaboration.
- Exceptional technical writing and communication skills, including design documents, ADRs/RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.
Nice to Have
- Experience integrating payment service providers or local rails such as UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards, and 3DS2.
- Experience with active-active or multi-region architectures, chaos engineering, and traffic management.
- Organization-scale OpenTelemetry leadership, including tail-based sampling and exemplars.
- FinOps experience with cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right-sizing.
- Familiarity with PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and privacy laws.
Skills
Go, Connectrpc, gRPC, Protocol Buffers, GCP, GKE, Kubernetes, Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, OpenTelemetry, Vue, React Query
Similar jobs
Backend Engineering jobs
Rippling
Bengaluru, India
Leads architecture and hands-on development of scalable, reliable, and compliant financial integrity systems. The role requires 8+ years of software engineering experience, distributed-systems expertise, and the ability to drive complex initiatives and mentor engineers through influence.
GitLab
Bengaluru, India
Provides cross-team technical leadership for large backend initiatives, modular architecture, production operations, and AI-assisted engineering adoption. The role requires deep backend architecture experience, monolith modernization expertise, strong written influence, and mentoring ability.
Coinbase
India
Staff Software Engineer responsible for architecting and scaling security platform services, defining technical strategy, and mentoring engineers. Requires at least 8 years of software engineering experience plus strong system design, coding, and production-service expertise.
Reltio
Bengaluru, India
Staff Engineer leading design and delivery of large-scale distributed data platform features for enterprise customers. The role requires strong Java and cloud experience, architectural leadership, cross-functional collaboration, and mentorship.
Rippling
Bengaluru, India
Lead the technical direction and development of Rippling’s Data Catalog infrastructure, building internet-scale distributed systems and AI-enabled data discovery capabilities. The role requires 8+ years of software development experience, strong systems expertise, and the ability to partner with technical and non-technical stakeholders.