Staff Software Engineer

The Problems You'll Lead

Specific, near-term, on the roadmap:

• Ledger redesign. Our current ledger was built for single-rail, single-partner, single-currency U.S. flows. You'll lead the design of a double-entry, multi-partner sub-ledger architecture that can support new rails, new products, and international counterparties without losing the invariants we rely on today.

• Bank partner abstraction. We're moving from one sponsor bank to multiple. You'll design the integration layer that lets us add, swap, or route across partners without rewriting product code, including NACHA file generation and parsing, Fedwire MT message handling, RTP and FedNow ISO 20022 messaging, positive pay, returns, and exception workflows.

• Real-time risk in the settlement path. You'll design how OFAC screening, BSA/AML signals, and our in-house fraud models run inline on every money movement decision with sub-second latency and no compromise on correctness.

• Reconciliation as a service. Move us from nightly batch reconciliation to continuously-executing reconciliation against partner statements, with automated break detection, classification, and resolution workflows.

• Exactly-once disbursements. Rebuild our disbursement engine off a legacy state machine onto a ledger-backed, idempotent, rail-agnostic platform that handles originations, returns, reversals, refunds, and recoveries as first-class events.

What You'll Own

Payments architecture. The platform that originates, settles, reconciles, and recovers funds across ACH (standard and same-day), RTP, FedNow, domestic wire, international wire, and check. The ledger. The state machines. The idempotency guarantees. The reconciliation layer.
Rail expertise. You are the engineer in the room who knows what an R01 versus R10 return means, how RTP's request-for-payment flow differs from FedNow's liquidity management, why NACHA's risk management rules shape retry logic, how ISO 20022 messaging affects schema design, and how U.S. rails behave when the originator or beneficiary is international. You translate rail mechanics into durable system design.
Correctness as a practice, not a slogan. You'll set the standard for how we pursue correctness in financial code. Property-based tests for ledger invariants. Design docs that enumerate failure modes before code is written. Simulation frameworks for multi-party settlement scenarios. Continuously-executing reconciliation. We don't have all of this today. Building this discipline is part of the job.
Bank partner integration. A large share of the hard work in payments lives at the interface with banking partners. You'll own the engineering relationship with our sponsor banks, including file formats, cutoff windows, partner outage handling, exception processing, and the abstraction that lets us onboard a new partner in weeks instead of quarters.
Compliance engineering. At CertifID, compliance is a core engineering discipline, not a checkbox. You'll design how sanctions screening fits into our settlement path, how we prove to auditors that every dollar is traceable, how BSA/AML signals flow into real-time decisions, and how we handle Reg E disputes, Reg CC holds, and NACHA risk rules as durable system behavior.
Fraud and risk integration. Payments and fraud prevention are the same problem at CertifID. You'll work shoulder-to-shoulder with our data science and trust and safety teams to embed real-time risk signals into every money movement decision.
Technical strategy. The three-year payments roadmap. Build versus buy. When to introduce new rails. How to evolve the ledger. Where to invest in platform versus product work. You bring the evidence and the tradeoffs to leadership and drive alignment.
Operational excellence. The observability, incident response, and production readiness bar for financial systems. You own the hard incidents. You write the postmortems that change how we build. You make sure the engineer on call at 2am has the telemetry they need.
Mentorship and multiplication. You raise the ceiling of the payments engineering team. You review designs, coach senior engineers into staff engineers, and set technical standards that outlast any single project.

What We're Looking For

• 10+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 4 years building production payments or financial systems at scale.

• Deep, hands-on expertise across U.S. payment rails. You've shipped systems that move money over ACH, RTP, FedNow, wire, or check, and you understand the operational realities of each: cutoffs, returns, reversals, exceptions, reconciliation, and settlement.

• Experience designing systems that handle international counterparties on U.S. rails. You understand how OFAC screening, correspondent banking, and beneficiary data requirements shape system design even when the rail itself is domestic.

• Proven command of the primitives that make money movement safe: double-entry ledgers, idempotency, exactly-once processing, distributed state machines, eventual consistency tradeoffs, and reconciliation architectures.

• Strong system design skills in high-volume, fault-tolerant transaction processing. You've designed for the failure modes, not just the happy path.

• Production-grade skills in Python, Java, Go, C#, or an equivalent backend language, with deep familiarity running services on AWS or Azure.

• Track record of leading technical direction for a team or domain without formal authority. You influence through clarity, evidence, and shipped systems.

• Exceptional written communication. You can explain a ledger invariant to a product manager, a settlement outage to an executive, and a rail migration plan to a banking partner.

• Pragmatism. You know when to ship the simple thing, when to invest in the platform, and when to push back on scope.

 
Bonus points:

• Experience integrating with sponsor banks, BaaS providers, or payment processors.

• Working familiarity with NACHA rules, Reg E, Reg CC, OFAC screening, and BSA/AML controls as they apply to software design.

• Experience with ISO 20022 messaging, Fedwire, SWIFT, or cross-border payment flows.

• Experience with real estate, title, escrow, or closing workflows.

• Experience building against SOC 2, PCI, or similar compliance regimes.

• Prior work in fraud prevention, identity verification, or trust and safety platforms.

What We Offer

• Flexible vacation
• 12 company-paid holidays
• 10 paid sick days
• No work on your birthday
• Health, dental, and vision Insurance (including a $0 option)
• 401(k) with matching, and no waiting period
• Equity
• Life insurance
• Generous parental paid leave
• Wellness reimbursement of $300/year
• Remote worker reimbursement of $300/year
• Professional development reimbursement
• Competitive pay
• An award-winning culture