Staff Software Engineer, Financial Platform - Issuing

Responsibilities

• Serve as a technical expert on global card networks, interpreting network specifications, message flows, certification requirements, mandates, and production behavior.
• Work directly with card networks to influence requirements, resolve ambiguity, and secure outcomes for Block.
• Lead complex, ambiguous engineering problems spanning multiple teams, systems, and domains.
• Partner with technical leads, program owners, and senior stakeholders to shape solutions at the intersection of network requirements and the issuing platform.
• Write production code, build certification and conformance tooling, analyze network messages, review designs and code, and debug protocol- and field-level issues.
• Drive network certification and mandatory release cycles end to end, translating requirements into pragmatic engineering decisions.
• Establish shared frameworks, standards, tooling, and practices that enable teams to operate independently.
• Mentor engineers through design guidance, code reviews, documentation, and technical judgment.
• Apply AI-assisted tools throughout the engineering lifecycle.
• Participate in on-call rotation, incident response, and reliability improvements for critical financial systems.

Requirements

• Deep, current expertise with at least one major card network, ideally Visa.
• Experience with direct network connectivity, ISO 8583, authorization and clearing flows, stand-in processing, specifications, certification, and mandate cycles.
• Experience personally building, certifying, or operating a live direct network connection rather than integrating only through a processor.
• Experience working directly with card networks on rulings, exceptions, extensions, configuration changes, defect fixes, or certification outcomes.
• Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating highly reliable financial or payments systems at scale.
• Experience leading technically complex, ambiguous work across team boundaries and influencing technical direction.
• Experience creating frameworks, standards, tooling, architecture, or practices adopted by other engineers and teams.
• Broad understanding of the card lifecycle, including issuance and fulfillment, provisioning and activation, authorization, ledgering, clearing and settlement, reconciliation, disputes, or fraud.
• Working knowledge of Mastercard and American Express.
• Fluency with AI-assisted engineering workflows and ability to evaluate AI-generated output.
• Willingness to participate in on-call rotation.

Compensation

• Annual base salary: $263,600–$395,400 USD.