Staff Software Engineer

Role

Staff Software Engineer

Type

Full-time, W2

Location

Hybrid in New York City. Currently 2 to 3 days per week onsite.

Management

Individual contributor who ships code by writing, testing, and deploying production software, works with customers to understand and resolve technical issues, and owns systems end to end. This is not a management role.

Reports to

CEO

Benefits

• Meaningful founding engineer equity.
• Medical, dental, and vision coverage fully paid.
• Flexible PTO.
• Hardware of choice.
• Opportunity to work directly with customers on live production systems.
• Opportunity to build expertise in payments infrastructure, EMV, and SoftPOS.

The Company

The company builds payments infrastructure that allows developers to add Tap to Pay on iPhone and Android using a white-label SDK. The platform lets processors, payment service providers, payment facilitators, independent software vendors, and software companies turn phones into payment terminals without additional hardware. It handles onboarding requirements, customer integrations, and payment processing at scale. The platform is live in production with multiple major processor certifications, supports live customer transactions, and continues to expand across large acquiring platforms in the United States. The company is private, growing quickly, adding customers, expanding certifications, and raising another funding round to support increasing demand.

Company Culture

The company has a very small team and intentionally plans to stay lean. Everyone wears multiple hats and owns what they build from design through production support. There are no platform teams, ticket queues, or handoffs. Engineers work directly with customers, solve production issues, debug distributed systems, and learn new technologies as needed. The team moves quickly, ships continuously, and values ownership, systems thinking, and collaboration across the full stack.

The Opportunity

This is effectively the second engineering hire and a founding engineer role. You will work directly with the CEO every day and become the technical second in command while remaining an individual contributor. You will own systems from end to end, including payment flows, backend services, APIs, infrastructure, customer integrations, production support, certifications, debugging, and systems design. You will build and operate services in the transaction path where correctness, latency, availability, and security are critical. You will help customers integrate the SDK, answer technical questions, resolve production issues, and support the complete payment flow from tap through transaction response. As the company grows, you will take ownership of much of the day-to-day engineering work while future engineers specialize in other areas.

Responsibilities

• Design, build, test, deploy, and support production software.
• Own systems from design through production support.
• Build and operate backend services and APIs in the payment transaction path.
• Develop and support authorization flows, transaction routing, offline and deferred authorization (SAF), audit trails, network tokenization, processor integrations, EMV certification, key management, observability, and internal simulators.
• Help customers integrate the SDK, answer technical questions, and troubleshoot production issues.
• Debug distributed systems and resolve production incidents.
• Work across backend services, APIs, infrastructure, and mobile SDK code.
• Write and maintain documentation and API specifications.
• Work directly with customers and take ownership outside traditional job boundaries.

Qualifications, skills, and experience

What’s Required:

• 7 or more years building and operating production systems at scale.
• Startup experience, ideally at a company with 10 or fewer full-time employees.
• Experience working in the payments or fintech industry.
• Understanding of payment systems, including authorization flows, transaction processing, idempotency, and payment infrastructure.
• Python experience.
• AWS experience.
• Strong backend engineering skills.
• Strong systems thinking and debugging skills.
• Experience designing APIs and writing technical documentation.
• Experience writing, testing, deploying, and supporting production software.
• Experience working directly with customer engineering teams.
• Comfortable working across backend services, APIs, infrastructure, and mobile SDK code.
• Willingness to own production systems, customer issues, certifications, and detailed engineering work.
• Comfortable learning new technologies as needed.
• Hybrid work schedule with onsite collaboration.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with EMV, SoftPOS, Tap to Pay, contactless payments, tap transactions, or ICC transactions.
• Experience with key management, HSMs, mTLS, or PCI compliance.
• Mobile development experience with Kotlin or Swift.
• Founding engineer or first engineer experience.
• Experience with developer platforms.
• Experience improving developer experience and onboarding flows.
• Experience with self-service or product-led growth platforms.
• Experience at Block, Square, PayPal, or Capital One.

Miscellaneous:

• Company is unable to sponsor a Visa.