Staff Engineer

Zip Co Limited

2d • Remote

About The Position

We are seeking a highly experienced and technically strong Staff Engineer to lead complex, cross-domain initiatives across our platform. In this role, you will set technical direction, drive execution on ambiguous, high-impact problems, and shape the architecture of systems that are critical to our business. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will partner with engineering and product leaders, influence strategic decisions, and mentor senior engineers while raising the bar for scalability, reliability, and engineering excellence across the organization.
You will also play a key role in defining and scaling how AI is used across engineering, driving measurable improvements in developer productivity, system quality, and delivery speed.

Requirements

• 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed backend systems in modern engineering environments.
• Strong experience in payments, fintech, or other correctness-critical systems such as settlement, reconciliation, or transaction processing.
• Proven track record of leveraging AI to improve engineering outcomes, including personal productivity and enabling team-wide adoption at scale.
• Experience leading complex, cross-team initiatives and driving technical direction across multiple systems.
• Deep expertise in system design, including event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-availability systems.
• Hands-on engineering mindset. You stay close to implementation and can dive into code, services, and infrastructure when needed.
• Strong decision-making ability. You can evaluate tradeoffs and make clear technical calls in ambiguous situations.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS, and backend technologies like C#/.NET or similar.
• Experience evaluating and selecting AI tools, models, and workflows with an understanding of tradeoffs (cost, latency, accuracy, safety).
• Ability to define metrics and measure the impact of AI adoption (e.g., developer velocity, code quality, cycle time, incident reduction).
• Clear alignment with Zip’s core values

Nice To Haves

• Experience building and scaling systems in fintech or other highly regulated environments, such as payments, lending, banking, settlement, reconciliation, fraud, risk, or transaction processing.
• Experience working in AI-forward, high-scale engineering environments where teams are building at the edge of modern cloud, distributed systems, developer productivity, or applied AI.
• Hands-on experience building production-grade AI capabilities beyond prompt engineering, such as AI agents, agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, model evaluation pipelines, workflow automation, or AI-powered internal platforms.
• Experience architecting agentic AI systems that safely interact with internal tools, APIs, business workflows, and human-in-the-loop approval processes.
• Experience defining responsible AI governance patterns, including data access controls, model/tool selection standards, evaluation frameworks, observability, cost management, auditability, and risk controls.
• Experience partnering with business, product, risk, compliance, security, legal, or operations leaders to translate ambiguous strategic problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Experience building AI-enabled engineering platforms that improve developer velocity, code quality, testing, debugging, incident response, observability, or release confidence.
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML infrastructure, including model serving, fine-tuning, embeddings, vector search, distributed training, inference optimization, model evaluation, or experimentation platforms.
• Experience with cloud-based AI/ML services and frameworks such as AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader who can set strategy across teams, prototype emerging technologies, and raise the bar for engineering excellence.

Responsibilities

• Design systems that ensure safe, reliable money movement at scale across distributed services.
• Define and evolve platform patterns for event-driven architectures and cross-team system design.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production across multiple teams.
• Balance speed and long-term platform health in critical financial systems.
• Define and standardize AI-assisted engineering patterns (e.g., code generation, testing, debugging, incident analysis) that can be adopted across teams.
• Raise the bar for system reliability, performance, and developer experience across the organization.
• Build systems that ensure financial correctness under failure conditions, including retries, duplication, and reconciliation scenarios.
• Drive adoption of AI across teams by coaching engineers, establishing best practices, and ensuring responsible and effective usage.
• Identify and deliver AI-driven efficiencies, reducing development cycle time, improving code quality, and accelerating incident resolution.
• Partner with platform and tooling teams to integrate AI capabilities into the developer ecosystem (CI/CD, observability, IDEs, internal tools).

Benefits

• Flexible working culture
• Incentive programs
• Unlimited PTO
• Generous paid parental leave
• Leading family support policies
• Company-sponsored 401k match
• Learning and wellness subscription stipend
• Beautiful Union Square office with a casual dress code
• Industry-leading, employer-sponsored insurance for you and your dependents, with several 100% Zip-covered choices available

What This Job Offers

• Job Type: Full-time
• Career Level: Senior
• Education Level: No Education Listed