Staff Engineer - Customer Onboarding

Adyen•Chicago, IL

About The Position

This is Adyen Adyen provides payments, data, and financial products in a single solution for customers like Meta, Uber, H&M, and Microsoft - making us the financial technology platform of choice. At Adyen, everything we do is engineered for ambition. For our teams, we create an environment with opportunities for our people to succeed, backed by the culture and support to ensure they are enabled to truly own their careers. We are motivated individuals who tackle unique technical challenges at scale and solve them as a team. Together, we deliver innovative and ethical solutions that help businesses achieve their ambitions faster. Staff Engineer - Customer Onboarding As a Staff Engineer for Onboarding, you will lead the evolution of the Adyen merchant journey into a seamless, high-velocity activation layer. You are an Applied AI Specialist who views onboarding as an Intelligent Extraction and Reasoning problem, using LLMs to interpret merchant documents and automate complex KYC/Risk mapping. You will design the architecture that turns complex regulatory and business requirements into a zero-friction activation experience for merchants.

Requirements

Systems Architect: You think in terms of merchant journeys and system bottlenecks. You have a track record of building resilient, distributed systems.
Compliance-Minded: You have a deep understanding of security-by-design, specifically as it relates to KYC, identity verification, and regulated data handling.
Full-Stack Powerhouse: Deeply proficient in Java and experienced in building high-concurrency API architectures.
Applied AI Experience: You have experience (or a deep technical interest) in building production-grade interfaces powered by LLMs, including harnesses, policy enforcement, evals, RAG architectures and secure data handling.
Entrepreneurial & Autonomous: You can navigate a large, global organization to align diverse teams (Risk, Operations, Product) on a unified technical vision for onboarding.

Responsibilities

Drive Activation Velocity: Lead the architecture for our global onboarding systems. You will build the logic that orchestrates the merchant lifecycle minimizing time-to-value without compromising stability.
Bridge Policy & Code: Act as the technical architect where business logic meets regulatory requirements. You will architect an onboarding concierge that uses real-time reasoning to ask only the necessary questions, proactively resolving compliance blockers through natural dialogue.
Product Strategy: Proactively shape the strategic roadmap in partnership with the Director of Engineering, other Staff Engineers, and Product teams. You will move beyond simply shipping features to deliver innovative solutions that drive merchant success and accelerated activation by proactively addressing and resolving systemic bottlenecks.
Global Standardization: Mentor engineers to drive technical standards that ensure the user journey is compliant and performant across all regions, balancing local regulatory needs with a global core architecture.