Software Engineer, Payments Infrastructure

Salary: $211,000 - 251,000 per year Requirements:

• We want 7+ years of experience building backend, platform, or infrastructure systems, with a history of delivering and operating highly reliable production services at a strong engineering organization.
• We value a strong security mindset: you should design as if every component may eventually be compromised, and think naturally about blast radius, least privilege, and preventing bad states rather than merely responding to them.
• You should be fluent in a systems language; we use Go, and you should be comfortable owning critical distributed systems end to end, from design through production and on-call support.
• We look for experience setting technical direction on ambiguous, high-stakes problems, with the ability to get the right abstractions in place so they scale across teams and customers.
• We need a generalist approach: you build clear abstractions and protocols on top of messy, inconsistent external systems, and you do not settle for solving the same problem separately for each customer.
• We require a degree in Computer Science or a related field, or equivalent professional experience.
• Preferred experience includes regulated or sensitive-data environments such as payments, PCI, tokenization, key management, or healthcare and PHI.
• It is a plus to have depth in applied cryptography and key management, voice/telephony or real-time media pipelines, or cloud security and network isolation.
• We also value experience building platforms that other engineering teams use, such as internal protocols, SDKs, and self-serve developer services.

• We design the secure-capture protocol that sits behind every channel, creating a single continuous payment experience for the user while telephony providers, contact-center platforms, embedded chat, and our own voice stack all expose one event lifecycle to agent code.
• We build and expand the tokenization platform, including per-token envelope encryption with a unique data key for each token, so a compromise exposes only one token at a time.
• We own the security boundary around the cardholder-data environment, ensuring access is enforced by infrastructure rather than convention and remains auditable by design.
• We develop deterministic, auditable detection in the agent hot path to catch cardholder data that general-purpose models miss, and we help shape the purpose-built detection model that follows.
• We ensure no LLM, including any we build, ever sees plaintext cardholder data.
• We make payments usable for other engineers without requiring compliance expertise by advancing processor-agnostic charging, self-serve onboarding, and single-tenant deployments.
• We set technical direction across the teams hardest problems, establish abstractions that solve issues once rather than per customer, and raise the engineering bar around us.

• AI
• Backend
• Cloud
• Cryptography
• Embedded
• Support
• LLM
• Network
• Security
• CTO
• DevOps
• REST
• Salesforce
• VR

More:

We are Sierra, a company building a platform that helps businesses create more human customer experiences with AI. We are primarily an in-person team based in San Francisco, with growing offices in Atlanta, New York, London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Singapore, Japan, and Sydney. Our culture is grounded in Trust, Customer Obsession, Craftsmanship, Intensity, and Family. The team is led by co-founders Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, and we offer full-time employees benefits including flexible unlimited paid time off, medical, dental, and vision coverage for employees and family, life and disability insurance, a retirement plan depending on country of employment, parental leave, fertility and family-building support through Carrot, lunch plus snacks and coffee, a discretionary benefit stipend, and free alphorn lessons. We also support equity participation for eligible full-time employees, with benefits varying by region and subject to change.

last updated 37 week of 2026