Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Payments

Collaborative Solutions•Santa Ana, CA

1d•Hybrid

About The Position

Collectors is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to lead the technical direction for their Payments team. This critical role involves building, scaling, and evolving the payments infrastructure that supports all transactions within the Collectors ecosystem. The team is responsible for the full lifecycle of payment capabilities, including integrating with and abstracting multiple payment gateway providers (like Stripe and PayPal), supporting various payment methods (credit card, ACH, digital wallets), and developing both APIs for downstream services and web application experiences for customers and internal tools. As a Staff Software Engineer, your influence will extend across the technology organization. You will possess expertise in the entire Payments portfolio, understanding how services interact and how money and data flow between them, while also developing a similar understanding of adjacent systems in grading, marketplace, vault, and identity. This is a high-impact, high-visibility position, as Payments is the financial backbone of the marketplace, touching everything from grading order checkouts to partner payouts. You will be responsible for architecture decisions, gateway strategy, and ensuring the quality of all shipped products.

Requirements

8+ years of engineering experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects.
Track record of designing, shipping, and scaling products with measurable business impact at a high-growth company or a scaled consumer platform.
Expert-level backend engineering in C# (.NET).
Experience owning complex API surfaces, async patterns, and data consistency in distributed systems.
Hands-on production experience across the entire stack: React, Svelte, and TypeScript frontends, API and service layers, data stores, and the infrastructure they run on.
Deep payments or fintech expertise, including owning gateway integrations, idempotency, webhook reliability, tokenization, reconciliation, and PCI compliance in production.
Deep database and data-modeling expertise, both relational (e.g. PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB).
Strong distributed-systems fundamentals: service boundaries, API and contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling.
Production AWS and Kubernetes depth, with infrastructure-as-code fluency (CDK and/or Terraform).
Track record of raising engineering standards across testing strategy, observability, documentation, and incident response.
Observability-first mindset: instrumenting code, building dashboards and alerting, and using distributed tracing to debug production issues.
Security-minded approach to payment security as a first-class engineering concern.
Daily fluency with AI coding assistants and agentic tools (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar), experience integrating them into team workflows, and mature judgment about verification, security, and the limits of AI-generated code.
Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies.
Excellent written and verbal communication skills with technical and business audiences.
Sharp analytical and troubleshooting instincts.
Extreme ownership mindset and willingness to wear any hat required to get the job done.
Ability to thrive in a fast-moving, self-directed environment.

Nice To Haves

Passion for collecting.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture of the Payments domain end to end, including C#/.NET payment services, distributed event-driven systems on AWS and Kubernetes, relational and NoSQL data stores, gateway integrations, and frontends.
Architect for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling through clean service boundaries, contract design, clear data ownership, and well-sequenced migration paths.
Set multi-gateway strategy and lead high-stakes migrations, defining abstractions across payment gateway providers (Stripe, PayPal, etc.) for low-risk integration, swapping, or failover.
Own payment flows from initiation through settlement, refund, and reconciliation, and drive gateway migrations, payment-method expansion, and re-platforming efforts with low-risk cutovers under live transaction volume.
Set the bar for security, compliance, and resilience, establishing standards for PCI-DSS practice, tokenization, idempotency, retry and webhook reliability, audit controls, testing strategy, and observability.
Use operational data to drive stability and performance improvements, partnering with Security and Compliance to maintain and advance certifications.
Lead complex, multi-quarter delivery projects, coordinating engineers, stakeholders, and dependencies.
Plan using an explicit value-vs-cost framework to ensure urgency and prioritization are easily understood.
Surface blockers and delays to the right people before they become surprises.
Drive cross-functional execution by translating business requirements into technical solutions and partnering across Payments, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Finance, Security, and platform teams.
Build a working model of adjacent systems, including CRM, identity, and data/ETL, to identify cross-system risks early.
Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and feedback.
Foster a culture of knowledge sharing and documentation within the team and with business stakeholders.
Build strong relationships with teammates, manager, business and Finance stakeholders, and senior engineers across the organization.
Lead an AI-first approach to building, establishing standards and guardrails for AI coding tools, identifying where AI agents can accelerate payments work, and raising the organization's collective AI fluency.