Staff Software Engineer - Payments Platform (L5/6 - Full Stack)

We’re seeking a Staff Software Engineer who loves digging into real systems, shaping technical direction, and writing high-quality code that ships. This role sits at the heart of our business: the payments platform that moves money, protects customers, and anchors our reputation. You’ll be a technical driver for a domain that blends fintech, complex business logic, and high-impact operational responsibilities.

You will serve as a key architect and technical voice within the payments area of our modular monolith and supporting services, while staying very hands-on. You’ll play a central role in shaping direction through clear design and strong implementation. You’ll be designing models and processing flows, improving resiliency, rebuilding legacy logic, and leading by example through clear code and thoughtful technical decisions.

This role is ideal for someone who takes pride in correctness and clarity, enjoys collaborating with thoughtful product and operations partners, and wants to build a payments foundation that the company can rely on for years.

What You’ll Do:

Lead deep technical work within the payments domain, designing systems, modeling complex business flows, and writing production code.
Act as the architect for payments processing inside our Django-based modular monolith, shaping the long-term structure of models, boundaries, and workflows.
Break down product ideas into well-scoped technical plans, timelines, and actionable work for the team.
Strengthen the reliability of our money-movement flows, emphasizing correctness, idempotency, and clear separation of the core payments engine from the product workflows that rely on it, so each can evolve without stepping on the other.
Collaborate closely with product, engineering leadership, and operations stakeholders to surface and mitigate risks early.
Coach and level up engineers through pair programming, reviews, technical docs, and constructive feedback.
Improve engineering quality across testing, observability, documentation, and on-call readiness.
Help shape our emerging internal data platform by ensuring payments and financial data is modeled and emitted cleanly.
Contribute to on-call in a sustainable way and help drive down long-term operational load.

What You Bring:

7+ years of software engineering experience, with a strong foundation in computer science fundamentals.
2+ years operating as a senior/staff-level engineer with technical ownership and influence.
Proven ability to build and evolve complex server-side systems.
Professional Python experience and Django experience from real production work.
Experience designing and iterating data models in production systems.
Ability to decompose ambiguous requirements, identify risks, estimate effectively, and drive clarity across a team.
Strong communication skills, especially when collaborating with non-technical partners.
A “do the right thing” mindset around quality-tests, instrumentation, naming, structure, and documentation.

Nice to Haves:

Background in payments, fraud, fintech, or other transactional systems.
Familiarity with ACH, virtual card, and bank-file formats
Experience modernizing legacy domains without rewriting from scratch.
Familiarity with observability tools (Datadog, New Relic, etc.).
Experience with cloud platforms (AWS preferred).
Exposure to ML-powered decisioning or data workflow tooling.

Why This Role Matters:

This role gives you the chance to:

Own a business-critical domain where correctness matters.
Shape the architecture and future direction of the payments platform.
Strengthen domain boundaries and bring clearer structure to an evolving codebase.
Collaborate closely with Product on high-impact initiatives.
Influence teams and mentor engineers without moving into people management.

If you love working through real complexity, enjoy building resilient systems that people depend on, and want to have outsized influence on both business outcomes and engineering practice, this is the role for you.

Why Work Here:

We have a proven market need
Our product stops payments fraud (yes, we regularly stop bad guys!)
We are small and nimble, and we move fast
We respect that you have a life outside of work (i.e., we have options for flexible work schedules and we have great benefits, including unlimited PTO)
Every employee has an impact – no one here is a cog in a machine

Applicants must pass a background check prior to being officially accepted for employment.

Job is remote; however, applicants must reside in one of the following states:

Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Georgia, Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Maine, Massachusetts, Montana, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Texas, Virginia, Washington, West Virginia, Wisconsin

At PaymentWorks, we base our employment decisions entirely on business needs, job requirements, and qualifications. We do not discriminate based on race, gender, religion, health, parental status, personal beliefs, veteran status, age, or any other status. We have zero tolerance for any kind of discrimination, and we are looking for candidates who share those values. Applications from women and members of underrepresented minority groups are welcomed.

About PaymentWorks

PaymentWorks digital supplier onboarding is the foundation of vendor master data management – enabling organizations to control costs and risks while executing a payables strategy to optimize the time value of money.

To apply for this position, send an e-mail to: careers@paymentworks.com

Staff Software Engineer – Payments Platform (L5/6 – Full Stack)