Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineer
Location - Fremont, CA (2 rounds, both in person interview)
C2H

What to Expect
Tesla is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to join our Payments and FinTech team, spearheading the technical strategy and architecture of systems that keep the lights on for the company. You will drive disruptive innovation in our AI-first transformation, architecting hyper-scale systems for payments, reconciliation, billing, invoicing, and accounts receivables that handle billions in annual revenue. This involves collaborating with cross-functional teams-including product, finance, engineering, and operations-to gather requirements and develop solutions aimed at reducing friction for internal and external customers.
In this role, you will operate in various segments including fraud, disbursements, and visibility, while evolving our platforms to support Tesla's next era of Robotaxi and Optimus expansion. You will prototype with new technologies (e.g., LLMs, Agents, Temporal) and champion their usage to ease developer cognitive load and system operations. This is a high-impact role for a pragmatic engineer motivated to fuel Tesla's sustainable future through cutting-edge, autonomous workflows.
What You'll Do

• Design, develop, and maintain scalable and efficient payment processing and financial systems for Tesla's products and services, ensuring 99.99% uptime
• Lead the architecture of core FinTech infrastructure, encompassing payments, reconciliation, billing, invoicing, and accounts receivables systems from 0 to 1 with an AI-first vision
• Develop and maintain API integrations with third-party payment processors, banks, and other financial institutions to facilitate global market complexities
• Identify and incorporate AI Agents and Large Language Models to increase automation in payments, billing, and reconciliation tasks, reducing operational toil
• Implement orchestration engines for reliability and human-in-the-loop workflows across FinTech platforms
• Mentor junior and senior engineers, contributing to the overall growth of the engineering team and driving best practices in system design and code quality
• Collaborate cross-functionally to ensure solutions align with system design, operational needs, and end-user impact, directly addressing pain points for internal and external stakeholders
• Improve the reliability and observability of FinTech platforms, including setting up distributed tracing, logging, and metrics pipelines for billing accuracy
• Stay up to date with the latest trends in the payments and software engineerin industry to identify new opportunities and drive innovation, especially where AI and operational scale intersect

What You'll Bring

• Degree in Computer Science, Information Technology, Software Engineering, or related field, or equivalent experience
• 8+ years of professional software engineering experience, including designing and operating production distributed systems at scale
• Strong proficiency in modern backend programming languages, with a specific preference for Go (Golang) or C#
• Solid Computer Science fundamentals and experience with CI/CD (Jenkins, Argo), containerization (Docker, Kubernetes), and observability tools (Prometheus, Grafana)
• Experience building AI agents or integrating intelligent systems (LLMs, prompt engineering) into real-world applications using platforms like OpenAI, HuggingFace, LangChain, or LlamaIndex
• Hands-on experience with workflow orchestration platforms (e.g., Temporal) and self- hosting complex infrastructure components in high-availability environments
• Demonstrated ability to architect and maintain distributed systems, with deep familiarity in service deployment and infrastructure operations
• Proven track record of handling global-scale complexities, such as multi-market payments and high-uptime requirements in mission-critical systems
• Familiarity with emerging AI technologies or tools for automation in financial workflows is highly desirable