Staff Engineer - Money, Risk & Payment Ancillaries

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer - Money, Risk & Payment Ancillaries based in Germany.

This is a senior technical leadership role focused on the systems that protect money and manage risk across global payment transactions.

You will shape architecture across risk, fraud, scams, money operations, reconciliations, and chargebacks.

The role combines hands-on engineering with cross-domain technical leadership in a zero-tolerance-for-failure environment.

You will design resilient, bank-grade systems where financial correctness, auditability, security, and real-time decision-making are critical.

You will work with event-driven, high-throughput and low-latency architectures while helping teams adopt strong engineering practices.

AI-assisted development is an integral part of the role, from design and implementation through testing, review, and operational workflows.

You will mentor engineers and collaborate closely with Product, Data/ML, Compliance, and other technical leaders to solve complex problems at global scale.

Accountabilities:

• Own the technical architecture and direction across risk, fraud, scams, money operations, reconciliations, and chargebacks, establishing scalable APIs, event-driven patterns, and engineering standards.
• Architect and develop low-latency, real-time systems that evaluate and respond to transaction risk and fraud before or during authorization.
• Design reliable money movement and reconciliation capabilities using strong consistency, idempotency, exactly-once processing, and auditable ledger principles.
• Build platforms supporting scam prevention, disputes, representment, and chargeback workflows while aligning systems with applicable regulatory and card-network requirements.
• Engineer highly available, resilient, secure, and compliant systems where reliability and financial accuracy cannot be compromised for feature velocity.
• Champion a "You Build It, You Run It" approach, ensuring services are designed for multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, automated observability, and reliable production ownership.
• Use AI-assisted engineering tools fluently across architecture, coding, testing, review, and operational workflows, while helping shape effective AI adoption across engineering teams.
• Mentor engineers, raise technical standards, and provide guidance on architecture, engineering practices, system reliability, and delivery.
• Partner with Product, Data/ML, Compliance, and Staff Engineers to deliver complex initiatives spanning multiple technical and business domains.
• Drive technical execution through strong engineering practices, measurable outcomes, DORA metrics, and proactive removal of technical or organizational blockers.

Requirements:

• Extensive software engineering experience with deep expertise in Go and/or Kotlin, supported by strong knowledge across the broader software development lifecycle.
• Proven experience architecting robust, scalable, and maintainable distributed systems, particularly event-driven, high-throughput, and low-latency platforms.
• Hands-on experience developing financial, payments, or risk-critical systems where correctness, consistency, reliability, and auditability are essential.
• Strong knowledge of AWS and cloud-native services such as RDS, ECS, EKS, S3, and related infrastructure.
• Excellent automated testing practices covering unit, integration, and end-to-end testing within Agile, DevSecOps, and CI/CD environments.
• Demonstrated technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, leading complex cross-team initiatives, and helping teams improve delivery performance.
• Strong architectural judgment, with a preference for clean, modular, maintainable systems and the ability to balance reliability and compliance with delivery speed.
• Advanced written and spoken English communication skills.
• Experience with fraud or risk scoring, ML feature pipelines, double-entry ledgers, reconciliation systems, chargebacks, disputes, or authorized push payment scam prevention is highly valuable.
• Experience with data-intensive and streaming technologies such as Kafka, exactly-once processing, or event sourcing is preferred.
• Previous experience in payments or fintech environments operating at global scale is advantageous.
• Knowledge of performance optimization, efficient algorithms, static analysis, code-quality tooling, and mature CI/CD practices is a plus.
• Experience introducing engineering standards or practices across multiple teams, contributing to open source, or producing technical content is beneficial.
• Spanish proficiency is considered an additional advantage.

Benefits:

• Competitive compensation.
• Fully remote work, with the flexibility to work from different locations.
• One-time home office allowance to support a productive and comfortable workspace.
• Work equipment provided.
• Stock options.
• Health plan available wherever you are.
• Flexible days off.
• Access to language, professional, and personal development courses.