Location: New York, United States • London, United Kingdom (Office)

On-Site | Full-time

Compensation: Competitive Compensation

Our client is a high-growth software development company and a major contributor to one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto social networks globally. Operating in a high-velocity, high-impact environment, the organization builds cutting-edge infrastructure that supports massive global transaction volumes and substantial revenue generation.

The organization is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Payments) to design and build the core payment services at the center of this ecosystem. This is a senior, high-ownership role designed for an engineer who thrives on solving hard, ambiguous problems end-to-end—from the moment money enters the system to final settlement, reconciliation, and delivery.

Operating within a lean team of highly experienced engineers, the successful candidate will focus on 0→1 development, moving quickly while maintaining the absolute rigor required for financial systems. The engineering culture prioritizes low bureaucracy, continuous production deployment, and trust in individual judgment over rigid processes.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full ownership of complex payment infrastructure challenges, carrying projects from initial architectural design through to production implementation and on-call support.
• Core Payment Services: Design, build, and optimize high-performance, mission-critical systems governing money movement, transaction processing, and ledgers.
• System Architecture: Develop resilient distributed systems using asynchronous and event-driven patterns, ensuring fault tolerance, strict consistency models, and exactly-once semantics.
• Data Integrity & Security: Implement robust database strategies, transaction management, and security protocols, ensuring absolute data correctness, key management hygiene, and comprehensive audit trails.
• Continuous Delivery: Ship high-quality code to production continuously, balancing a bias for action with the deliberate precision required for financial infrastructure.

Requirements

Core Qualifications

• Strong Backend / Systems Engineering: Proven track record of building high-performance, critical infrastructure. Deep experience in Rust is highly advantageous, but strong engineers from other systems backgrounds (such as Go, C++, or Java/Scala) who can rapidly adapt to Rust will be fully considered.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Thorough understanding of consistency models, idempotency, fault tolerance, and sagas, with experience designing systems that remain correct under partial failure conditions.
• Financial or Transactional Rigor: Prior experience in payments, fintech, high-throughput transaction processing, or another domain where system correctness is vital and "mostly works" is unacceptable.
• Advanced Database Fundamentals: Deep knowledge of transactions, indexing, query/caching strategies, event streaming, and a strong respect for auditability and reconciliation.
• Security-First Instinct: Natural adherence to secure engineering practices, including secrets hygiene, least-privilege access, and maintaining clean audit trails.
• Autonomy & Leadership: Ability to make high-impact technical decisions independently, navigate ambiguity comfortably, and execute both high-level design and necessary reliability work.

Preferred Attributes (Nice to Have)

• Deep Rust experience, open-source contributions, or performance optimization skills (profiling, reducing allocations, lock-free structures).
• Domain depth in payment rails (card networks, bank rails, chargebacks, open banking) or accounting fundamentals (double-entry ledgers, regulatory reporting).
• Experience building risk, fraud, or compliance infrastructure (rule engines, device fingerprinting, sanctions screening, KYC/AML workflows).
• Familiarity with crypto, Web3, or on-chain infrastructure (wallet infrastructure, stablecoin flows).
• A background in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, or observability.

Benefits

• Competitive Compensation: Highly competitive base salary.
• Equity & Upside: Generous equity and token allocation, offering direct alignment with the long-term growth and success of the platform.
• High Autonomy: A culture that trusts professional judgment, providing the freedom to make critical decisions without layers of bureaucratic approval.
• Impact: The opportunity to build core infrastructure for a globally dominant platform shaping the future of digital interaction and decentralized finance.

Interview Process

1. Recruiter / HR Screening Call
2. Founder / CEO Interview
3. Initial Technical Interview
4. Final Technical Interview