Staff Software Engineer (Payments)

Location: New York United States London United Kingdom (Office)

On-Site Full-time

Compensation:Competitive Compensation

Our client is a high-growth software development company and a major contributor to one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto social networks globally. Operating in a high-velocity high-impact environment the organization builds cutting-edge infrastructure that supports massive global transaction volumes and substantial revenue generation.

The organization is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Payments) to design and build the core payment services at the center of this ecosystem. This is a senior high-ownership role designed for an engineer who thrives on solving hard ambiguous problems end-to-endfrom the moment money enters the system to final settlement reconciliation and delivery.

Operating within a lean team of highly experienced engineers the successful candidate will focus on 01 development moving quickly while maintaining the absolute rigor required for financial systems. The engineering culture prioritizes low bureaucracy continuous production deployment and trust in individual judgment over rigid processes.

Key Responsibilities

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full ownership of complex payment infrastructure challenges carrying projects from initial architectural design through to production implementation and on-call support.
• Core Payment Services: Design build and optimize high-performance mission-critical systems governing money movement transaction processing and ledgers.
• System Architecture: Develop resilient distributed systems using asynchronous and event-driven patterns ensuring fault tolerance strict consistency models and exactly-once semantics.
• Data Integrity & Security: Implement robust database strategies transaction management and security protocols ensuring absolute data correctness key management hygiene and comprehensive audit trails.
• Continuous Delivery: Ship high-quality code to production continuously balancing a bias for action with the deliberate precision required for financial infrastructure.

Core Qualifications

• Strong Backend / Systems Engineering: Proven track record of building high-performance critical infrastructure. Deep experience in Rust is highly advantageous but strong engineers from other systems backgrounds (such as Go C or Java/Scala) who can rapidly adapt to Rust will be fully considered.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Thorough understanding of consistency models idempotency fault tolerance and sagas with experience designing systems that remain correct under partial failure conditions.
• Financial or Transactional Rigor: Prior experience in payments fintech high-throughput transaction processing or another domain where system correctness is vital and mostly works is unacceptable.
• Advanced Database Fundamentals: Deep knowledge of transactions indexing query/caching strategies event streaming and a strong respect for auditability and reconciliation.
• Security-First Instinct: Natural adherence to secure engineering practices including secrets hygiene least-privilege access and maintaining clean audit trails.
• Autonomy & Leadership: Ability to make high-impact technical decisions independently navigate ambiguity comfortably and execute both high-level design and necessary reliability work.

Preferred Attributes (Nice to Have)

• Deep Rust experience open-source contributions or performance optimization skills (profiling reducing allocations lock-free structures).
• Domain depth in payment rails (card networks bank rails chargebacks open banking) or accounting fundamentals (double-entry ledgers regulatory reporting).
• Experience building risk fraud or compliance infrastructure (rule engines device fingerprinting sanctions screening KYC/AML workflows).
• Familiarity with crypto Web3 or on-chain infrastructure (wallet infrastructure stablecoin flows).
• A background in platform engineering cloud infrastructure or observability.

• Competitive Compensation: Highly competitive base salary.
• Equity & Upside: Generous equity and token allocation offering direct alignment with the long-term growth and success of the platform.
• High Autonomy: A culture that trusts professional judgment providing the freedom to make critical decisions without layers of bureaucratic approval.
• Impact: The opportunity to build core infrastructure for a globally dominant platform shaping the future of digital interaction and decentralized finance.

Interview Process

1. Recruiter / HR Screening Call
2. Founder / CEO Interview
3. Initial Technical Interview
4. Final Technical Interview

Due to the high volume of applications we anticipate we regret that we are unable to provide individual feedback to all candidates. If you do not hear back from us within 4 weeks of your application please assume that you have not been successful on this occasion. We genuinely appreciate your interest and wish you the best in your job search.

Commitment to Equality and Accessibility:

At MLabs we are committed to offer equal opportunities to all candidates. We ensure no discrimination accessible job adverts and providing information in accessible formats. Our goal is to foster a diverse inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for all. If you need any reasonable adjustments during any part of the hiring process or you would like to see the job-advert in an accessible format please let us know at the earliest opportunity by emailing

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Required Experience:

Staff IC