Staff Engineer (Payments, AU)

EatClub

About The Position

EatClub is hiring a Staff Engineer, Payments, to provide hands-on technical leadership for the platform that handles payments from customers through payment partners to venue settlement. Working closely with the squad’s tech lead, the engineer will help set the technical direction and roadmap for payments across Australia, the UK and New Zealand; lead the design of complex, consequential payment systems; and contribute production code. The role represents the squad in technical discussions with payment partners, banks, acquirers and card schemes, and explains technical and commercial trade-offs to business stakeholders. It is a technical leadership position, not a people-management or architecture-only role. The role will strengthen payment reliability, risk and compliance, and help prepare EatClub’s payments capability for its next stage of growth. Example initiatives include documenting how payments work, improving core payment flows and approval rates, strengthening ledger and settlement foundations, supporting multiple markets as first-class markets, creating reusable integration patterns for bank and loyalty partners, and contributing to the future card and payments strategy. Success means establishing a shared source of truth for payments, building a reliable and well-understood platform ready for new markets and partners, structurally reducing payment incidents, clarifying the next stage of the payments strategy, and increasing the payments expertise of the engineers around the role-holder.

Requirements

At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including 4 or more years building production payment systems at a fintech, payments company, acquirer, issuer, scheme or bank.
Track record leading the design of significant payments work and carrying it through to production.
Deep practical understanding of card payments and the real-world behaviour of schemes, acquirers and payment providers.
Experience designing ledgers, settlement and reconciliation systems where correctness is measured in cents.
Strong backend engineering skills in a modern language on cloud infrastructure, with sound judgement about when a design is ready to ship.
Working knowledge of PCI DSS and designing systems that minimise compliance scope.
Experience leading incident response for payment systems and reducing incidents through structural change.
Record of helping other engineers improve through design reviews and mentoring.
Credibility with executives and external partners, and ability to explain payment trade-offs clearly to a CEO, bank and scheme.
Fluency with AI development tools and judgement about where they help or mislead.
Strong familiarity with idempotency and duplicate handling.
Able to lead technical design while remaining hands-on in production code.
Able to work alongside a tech lead without needing to be the final decision-maker or manage a team.

Nice To Haves

Card issuing or issuer-processor experience.
Experience at a high-growth fintech, neobank, BNPL or payments company that scaled under significant volume and regulatory scrutiny.
Familiarity with the Australian payments landscape and UK, New Zealand and US schemes.
Experience with a serverless AWS stack and event-driven systems.
Exposure to fraud and risk platforms, QSAs or ISO 27001 programmes.
Experience in a two-sided marketplace or hospitality technology.
Experience migrating a live financial system without disruption.
Experience safely changing legacy code on a money path in a complex codebase.
Experience architecting transaction authorisation under a strict time limit.

Responsibilities

Partner with the product manager and tech lead on payments platform direction and develop a roadmap the business can plan around.
Lead the design of complex payment problems and explain trade-offs in plain language.
Represent the squad in technical conversations with payment partners, acquirers and card schemes.
Bring external payments-industry best practices to the team and help implement them.
Strengthen platform-level reliability, risk and compliance.
Write production code for consequential changes, review other work and raise the engineering bar.
Advise the CPTO and tech lead on the future direction of EatClub’s payments capability.
Help establish and maintain a documented source of truth for payment systems and practices.
Design improvements to core payment flows to improve approval rates, reliability and customer experience.
Strengthen ledger, settlement and reconciliation foundations so money is accounted for correctly end to end.
Shape payments architecture for Australia, the UK and New Zealand.
Design reusable integration patterns for bank and loyalty partners.
Contribute to the technical path for the next stage of the card and payments strategy.
Lead payment incident response and reduce incident load through structural improvements.
Improve engineers’ payments capabilities through design reviews and mentoring.