Staff Software Engineer

Unstoppable starts with people. The future of payments is being built today, and at Paymentology, we are looking for people who want to help shape it. We power card issuing for leading banks, fintechs and digital brands across the globe, and as we continue to grow, we are looking for curious, ambitious people who thrive on solving complex challenges, embrace innovation and want to make a tangible impact at global scale. We’re currently in the middle of rolling out our new strategic card issuing platform, it conforms to all the best practices that you’d expect from a cloud native product. In your role you would bring your engineering mindset and help mature our ability to move customers from our current platforms into the new one. This is a complex journey, but you will not work on this alone as you’d join a team of client migrations experts. We believe that you bring your technical leadership and challenge the status quo to make the processes fully automatic. In this role you also have access to a wide array of SMEs across the organisation. Success in this role will not just be moving the needle for Paymentology as a company but creating a strong foundation for our success in the future. What You’ll Do
- Drive the technical strategy for a significant engineering domain or cross-team initiative.
- Translate large, ambiguous or unfamiliar problems into a clear technical direction and an achievable delivery approach.
- Shape architectures that support Paymentology’s long-term product and business needs.
- Evaluate complex technical trade-offs and communicate clear, evidence-based recommendations.
- Create architectural patterns, engineering standards and sensible defaults that can be adopted across teams.
- Identify and mitigate long-term risks relating to reliability, scalability, security, maintainability and operational complexity.
- Ensure dependencies and technical decisions are understood and aligned across teams.
- Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations and other stakeholders to inform roadmaps and delivery decisions.
- Unblock teams working through particularly difficult technical or organisational challenges.
- Mentor senior engineers and help them develop their technical leadership, decision-making and system-design capabilities.
- Lead working groups and cross-team initiatives that improve Paymentology’s wider engineering capability.
- Raise the standard of testing, observability, code quality, incident response and operational readiness.
- Contribute directly to critical systems when hands-on technical involvement is the most effective way to make progress.
- Help teams navigate complex situations with clarity, empathy and accountability. What We’re Looking For
- Extensive experience designing, building and operating complex backend or distributed systems. (As a guide, multiple projects with 10+ years of experience. Proving experience designing, building and operating highly availability, high throughput, business critical systems)
- A record of leading significant technical initiatives involving multiple teams or systems.
- The ability to establish technical direction without relying on formal authority.
- Strong architectural judgement and the ability to balance immediate delivery with longer-term sustainability.
- Experience breaking down ambiguous problems and creating alignment around practical solutions.
- A deep understanding of software design, system architecture and engineering fundamentals.
- Experience with microservices, APIs and event-driven architectures.
- Strong knowledge of relational databases, data modelling and system performance.
- Experience building and operating software in cloud environments, preferably AWS.
- An understanding of containerisation, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability and modern operational practices.
- A strong approach to automated testing and building quality into the development lifecycle.
- Experience improving the reliability, scalability and maintainability of production systems.
- The ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
- Experience coaching and mentoring experienced engineers.
- A collaborative and pragmatic approach, with the confidence to challenge decisions constructively.
- Professional fluency in English, our shared company language. Our primary backend technology is Java, and we are moving towards Java 21. Deep Java experience is valuable, but we also recognise that excellent engineers can transfer their knowledge between languages and technology stacks. Experience in payments, fintech or another high-throughput or regulated environment would be useful, but it is not essential. What Success Looks Like As a Staff Engineer, your impact will be visible in the effectiveness of the teams around you. Technical decisions will be clearer, teams will be better aligned and difficult initiatives will move forward with fewer surprises. Y