Principal Software Engineer, Receiver Products

Remitly•Seattle, WA

2d•$240,000 - $300,000•Hybrid

About The Position

At Remitly, we believe everyone deserves the freedom to access, move, and manage their money wherever life takes them. Since 2011, we've tirelessly delivered on our promise to customers sending money globally, providing secure, simple, and reliable ways to manage their money, ensuring true peace of mind. Whether it's supporting loved ones back home, growing a business across continents, or pursuing new opportunities abroad, we're not just here to move money— we're here to move our global customers forward. We're looking for builders, reimaginers, and global thinkers who want to work at the intersection of technology, trust, and transformation. If that's you and you're ready to do the most meaningful work of your career—we invite you to join over 2,800 passionate Remitlians worldwide who are united by our vision to transform lives with trusted financial services that transcend borders. About the Role: As a Principal Engineer on the Receiver Products team, you will be the technical architect and hands-on builder for a new generation of financial services designed for the people who receive remittances. You'll work at the intersection of zero-to-one product creation and large-scale, highly reliable systems — designing and shipping new capabilities that enable receivers to not just collect funds but to save and spend them safely within their own countries. This is a rare opportunity for an engineer who loves the energy of a startup, the rigor of regulated financial infrastructure, and the responsibility of building products that directly improve people's lives. You'll set the technical direction, define architectural standards, mentor engineers across multiple teams, and collaborate closely with product, design, compliance, and business partners to make ambitious ideas real.

Requirements

12+ years of software engineering experience, including significant time designing and operating distributed systems at scale.
Demonstrated experience leading zero-to-one technical efforts — greenfield service design, platform bootstrapping, or new-market technical launches.
Deep expertise in backend engineering: service oriented architectures, event-driven architectures, RESTful and async APIs, and relational or distributed databases.
Strong security and compliance sensibility, particularly in regulated industries (fintech, banking, payments, or healthcare).
Proven ability to influence without authority — driving alignment across engineering, product, legal, and operations stakeholders.
Exceptional written and verbal communication skills; comfortable presenting to both technical and executive audiences.

Nice To Haves

Experience building financial products for emerging markets (LATAM, Sub-Saharan Africa, South/Southeast Asia, or similar).
Background in payments infrastructure: card rails, ACH, real-time payment networks, mobile money, or digital wallets.
Familiarity with AML/KYC frameworks, PCI-DSS, or SOC 2 compliance in a software context.
Experience working with partner financial institutions, fintechs, or licensed payment processors via API integration.
Contributions to open-source or engineering community through publications, talks, or tooling.

Responsibilities

Architect & Build New Receiver Financial Services: Lead the design and delivery of net-new backend services that power receivers' ability to save and spend money in their home countries — from account structures to transaction rails.
Define APIs, data models, and event-driven architectures that are secure, extensible, and built to serve tens of millions of users.
Own end-to-end technical decisions — from system decomposition and service boundaries to resiliency patterns and observability strategies.
Integrate with the Remitly Money-Movement Platform: Partner with core platform teams to integrate new receiver-side capabilities with Remitly's global money-movement infrastructure — disbursements, FX, liquidity, and compliance.
Ensure seamless, safe hand-offs between send-side and receive-side flows, maintaining end-to-end data consistency and auditability.
Contribute to platform-wide standards for cross-service communication, idempotency, and failure handling.
Champion Security, Trust & Compliance: Embed security and compliance requirements from day one — working with Legal, Compliance, and Security Engineering to ensure all services meet AML, KYC, and local regulatory requirements in each receiver market.
Design systems with least-privilege access, encryption at rest and in transit, and comprehensive audit trails as non-negotiable defaults.
Lead threat-modeling exercises and drive remediation of vulnerabilities across your service surface area.
Scale with Confidence: Build for today's load and tomorrow's growth — designing systems that can handle millions of daily active receivers without sacrificing latency, reliability, or correctness.
Establish SLOs and error budgets for receiver product services, and build the operational tooling to meet them.
Drive a culture of operational excellence: on-call hygiene, runbooks, proactive capacity planning, and blameless post-mortems.
Elevate the Engineering Organization: Serve as a technical leader and multiplier — mentoring senior and staff engineers, leading design reviews, and shaping the technical roadmap for the receiver segment.
Author RFCs and architectural decision records that influence engineering standards across Remitly.
Collaborate with engineers and product managers in our team and across other teams to create executable technical plans.