Staff Software Engineer, Backend

What You Will Own

• Architect & Lead: Design, build, and maintain scalable, high-performance backend services using Golang microservices in a cloud-native environment.
• Solve Complex Challenges: Address large, open-ended engineering problems such as reducing operational costs, optimizing system performance, and improving payment processing efficiency.
• Drive Multi-Team & Multi-Quarter Initiatives: Lead large, strategic engineering projects that impact multiple teams and require deep expertise in distributed systems, API design, and database optimization.
• Improve System Reliability & Scalability: Ensure our payment systems are resilient, highly available, and fault-tolerant, leveraging best practices in cloud infrastructure, monitoring, and alerting.
• Optimization & Performance: Identify inefficiencies in our systems, propose solutions, and execute cost-saving and performance-enhancing initiatives in collaboration with engineering leadership.
• Foster Engineering Excellence: Mentor and coach engineers across multiple teams, sharing best practices and driving improvements in code quality, testing, and deployment.
• Lead Migrations & Technical Transitions: Spearhead critical system migrations, ensuring smooth rollouts with incremental adoption, rollback strategies, and clear communication across teams.
• Collaborate & Align Stakeholders: Work closely with product, infrastructure, and security teams to align technical strategies with business objectives and ensure smooth execution.
• Ensure Operational Readiness: Define monitoring, alerting, and incident response strategies to maintain system stability and performance.
• Champion Technical Strategy: Provide thought leadership on backend architecture, microservices best practices, and emerging technologies.

What You Will Need to Accomplish the Job

• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, with deep expertise in Golang, Java, Python, Ruby, C#, or similar languages.
• Strong experience designing and building scalable, distributed systems with microservices architecture.
• Proficiency in inter-service communication protocols (REST, gRPC, protobufs, message queues like NSQ, Kafka, or similar).
• Expertise in relational databases (PostgreSQL, MySQL, etc.) and optimization strategies.
• Strong experience in cloud environments (GCP preferred, AWS/Azure acceptable).
• Deep understanding of containerization, Kubernetes, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure as code (Terraform, Helm, etc.).
• Demonstrated ability to drive large-scale projects across multiple teams with clear communication, stakeholder alignment, and strategic decision-making.
• Experience leading technical migrations, ensuring smooth transitions with minimal disruption.
• Strong analytical skills with a data-driven approach to problem-solving and decision-making.
• Passion for mentoring and developing engineering talent within and across teams.

What Will Make Us Love You

• Experience with building and architecting systems around integrated Payments solutions (e.g. Stripe, Braintree, etc.), or with other fintech and financial systems.
• Knowledge of payments industry.
• Deploying into a public cloud service (especially GCP).
• Experience with protobufs/gRPC.
• Solid understanding of distributed systems and building scalable/redundant service.
• Experience with breaking up monolithic applications into microservices.
• Experience with service monitoring, metrics, alerting, log aggregation, and tracing.
• Experience with functional/acceptance testing.