Sr. Software Engineer

VGS•San Francisco, CA

3d•$170,000 - $215,000•Hybrid

About The Position

As a Sr. Software Engineer, Payments Quality, you will serve as a key technical practitioner and quality champion on our Payments Engineering team. You will take ownership of setting, building, and enforcing world-class quality standards across our core payment systems. In this role, you will write software for robust AI-assisted quality strategies covering end-to-end automated regression suites and high-concurrency performance and load testing. Working closely with feature development engineers, Tech Leads, and Product Management, you will ensure our mission-critical, high-throughput payment platform and applications operate with zero downtime and flawless accuracy. Rather than relying on manual QA or traditional top-down testing scripts, you will leverage AI-native engineering methodologies and integrate test automation across the entire SDLC. You will also be building emulators for external systems, such as card networks and other partner integrations. We are looking for hands-on builders who refuse to settle for the status quo, hate manual friction, and take immense pride in fortifying enterprise-grade financial systems for scalability, reliability, and security.

Requirements

5+ years of software engineering experience focusing on quality engineering, test automation framework design, and performance testing for complex, high-throughput distributed systems.
Deep hands-on experience building automated test suites in Java, Python, Go, or TypeScript, with a strong command of REST API testing and microservices validation.
Proven track record designing and running performance, stress, and load tests at scale using tools like JMeter, Locust, Gatling, or k6.
Direct experience embedding automated quality gates into modern CI/CD pipelines (GitHub Actions, GitOps) within containerized environments (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) on public clouds (AWS).
Experience testing event-driven architectures (Kafka, SQS) and relational/NoSQL databases, ensuring data consistency and transactional integrity under load.
An innate drive to eliminate manual friction, proactively seek out edge cases, and acquire whatever missing domain context is needed to solve complex quality challenges end-to-end.

Nice To Haves

Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
BA/BS degree
A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
Domain expertise in 3DS, Network Tokens, Account Updater, or payment gateway integrations.
Experience with AI developer tools, LLM-generated test automation pipelines, or synthetic test data generation.
Practical knowledge of compliance and cloud security constraints (PCI-DSS, SOC2).

Responsibilities

Architect and Embed Quality Benchmarks: Own the overarching quality strategy for Payments Acceptance, building automated guardrails so seamlessly into our pipelines that rigorous end-to-end validation happens automatically, without slowing down feature teams, accelerating release cycles.
Drive Performance & Stress Testing: Architect and execute high-concurrency load, stress, and latency testing to stress-test payment pipelines under extreme transaction volumes. You own the mission of ensuring our platform never drops transactions or degrades in latency during peak periods.
Pioneer AI-Native Software Engineering focused on Quality: Actively integrate AI-assisted developer tools and agentic workflows into test creation, synthetic data generation, and automated edge-case analysis to multiply testing velocity. Build high performance emulators for external systems.
Deep Observability & Incident Prevention: Implement robust telemetry and telemetry-driven test environments using tools like Prometheus and Grafana to monitor system behavior under load, driving blameless post-mortems and proactive bug prevention.
Cross-Functional Velocity & Mentorship: Partner with feature teams to build "Golden Paths" for automated testing, ensuring engineers can validate code rapidly with high confidence. Mentor team members on quality engineering best practices.