Staff Product Engineer - Payments

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Product Engineer - Payments based in Canada.

This is an opportunity to shape the backend infrastructure behind a mission-critical benefits money movement platform.

You will design and operate systems that securely move millions of dollars across thousands of accounts with a strong focus on reliability and accuracy.

The role combines deep backend engineering with product judgment, technical leadership, and end-to-end ownership.

You will tackle complex and ambiguous challenges across payments, transaction processing, reconciliation, and financial workflows.

Working closely with product, operations, finance, and business teams, you will connect technical decisions to meaningful customer and business outcomes.

The environment is fast-moving and collaborative, with high expectations around security, observability, maintainability, and engineering quality.

Accountabilities

• Design, build, and operate reliable backend systems supporting money movement, benefit spending, account verification, transaction processing, reconciliation, and related financial workflows.
• Lead complex initiatives from discovery and problem definition through technical design, implementation, production release, monitoring, and continuous improvement.
• Partner with product, operations, finance, compliance, and business stakeholders to understand user needs, business objectives, and operational constraints.
• Make architectural and technical decisions that balance speed, reliability, security, compliance, maintainability, and user experience.
• Build resilient financial infrastructure with strong guarantees around correctness, idempotency, auditability, observability, and failure recovery.
• Contribute across the technology stack when required, including frontend development, to deliver complete product outcomes.
• Write clean and maintainable code, participate in code reviews, mentor engineers, and promote strong engineering practices and standards.
• Investigate and resolve complex production issues while maintaining effective monitoring, alerting, logging, and incident response practices.
• Use AI coding tools and agents thoughtfully to accelerate development while retaining strong technical judgment and ownership of engineering decisions.
• Operate with urgency and accountability while maintaining high standards for quality, security, reliability, and long-term system health.

Requirements

• 5+ years of professional software engineering experience, with a strong background in backend development and technical ownership.
• 2+ years of experience in fintech, payments, banking, benefits administration, or another domain involving financial transactions or regulated workflows.
• Proven experience building, maintaining, and operating production systems where reliability, correctness, scalability, and observability are critical.
• Demonstrated ability to independently deliver complex projects with measurable customer or business impact.
• Strong proficiency in Python and solid understanding of backend architecture, APIs, data modeling, and distributed systems.
• Strong SQL skills and experience with relational databases, preferably PostgreSQL.
• Experience with payment concepts such as transactions, ledgers, reconciliation, KYB/KYC, account verification, ACH/card payments, or payment operations.
• Experience designing resilient systems with robust monitoring, alerting, logging, incident response, and failure-recovery mechanisms.
• Experience with Django and Django REST Framework is preferred.
• Experience designing financial data models, ledger systems, reconciliation processes, or transaction-processing workflows is highly valuable.
• Experience with compliance-aware engineering in fintech, healthcare, benefits, payroll, banking, or insurance environments is preferred.
• Familiarity with component-based frontend frameworks such as React or Vue, with the ability to contribute to frontend experiences when necessary.
• Strong product sense and the ability to connect technical decisions with user and business outcomes.
• Clear, direct communication skills and the ability to collaborate effectively with technical and non-technical stakeholders.
• Strong ownership, adaptability, problem-solving ability, attention to detail, and a bias toward action balanced with sound risk judgment.
• Startup or high-growth company experience is a plus.

Benefits

• 100% Silver Plan medical coverage, plus dental and vision benefits.
• Primary care membership providing access to the same type of care offered to members.
• 401(k) retirement plan and life insurance.
• Unlimited paid time off (PTO).
• Remote-first work environment with flexibility to work from wherever you are most productive.
• MacBook and home office setup stipend to support an effective remote workspace.
• Competitive equity and the opportunity to share in the value created by the business.
• Opportunity to work on meaningful financial infrastructure supporting more accessible healthcare benefits.
• Collaborative, mission-driven environment with significant ownership and opportunities to influence product and technical direction.