Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Payments

Collectors • Santa Ana, CA

15h • 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 payment 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. This is a high-impact, high-visibility position as Payments is the financial backbone of the marketplace, touching various aspects from checkout to partner payouts. The role requires owning architecture decisions, gateway strategy, and quality standards.

Requirements

• 8+ years 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), including complex API surfaces, async patterns, and data consistency in distributed systems.
• Full-stack range with hands-on production experience across the entire stack (React, Svelte, and TypeScript frontends, API and service layers, data stores, and infrastructure).
• 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), including schema design, migrations, and query performance.
• Strong distributed-systems fundamentals, including 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).
• A track record of raising engineering standards across testing strategy, observability, documentation, and incident response.
• Observability-first mindset, including instrumenting code with Datadog or similar tools, 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 (CI, code review, documentation), and mature judgment about verification, security, and the limits of AI-generated code.
• Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies, including iterative delivery cycles, sprint planning, and adapting to changing priorities.
• Influential communicator with excellent written and verbal communication skills for technical and business audiences.
• Sharp analytical and troubleshooting instincts.
• Bias for ownership and an extreme ownership mindset.
• Thrives 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 adding, swapping, or failing over.
• Own payment flows from initiation through settlement, refund, and reconciliation.
• 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.
• Translate business requirements into technical solutions and partner across various teams (Payments, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Finance, Security, platform) to deliver seamless payment experiences.
• Build a working model of adjacent systems, including CRM, identity, and data/ETL, to catch 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.
• Establish standards and guardrails for AI coding tools, including code review expectations, testing requirements, and security/IP hygiene.
• Identify where AI agents can accelerate payments work.
• Raise the organization's collective AI fluency by sharing proven workflows and coaching engineers on AI tooling.

Benefits

• We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, national origin, gender, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or parental status, disability, veteran status, or other class protected by applicable law.
• If you require an accommodation to apply or interview with us due to a disability or special need, please email [email protected].

What This Job Offers

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