Staff Software Engineer (Payments)

MLabs • New York, NY

1d • Onsite

About The Position

Our client is a high-growth software development company and a major contributor to one of the largest and fastest-growing crypto social networks globally. Operating in a high-velocity, high-impact environment, the organization builds cutting-edge infrastructure that supports massive global transaction volumes and substantial revenue generation.
The organization is seeking a Staff Software Engineer (Payments) to design and build the core payment services at the center of this ecosystem. This is a senior, high-ownership role designed for an engineer who thrives on solving hard, ambiguous problems end-to-end—from the moment money enters the system to final settlement, reconciliation, and delivery.
Operating within a lean team of highly experienced engineers, the successful candidate will focus on 0→1 development, moving quickly while maintaining the absolute rigor required for financial systems. The engineering culture prioritizes low bureaucracy, continuous production deployment, and trust in individual judgment over rigid processes.

Requirements

• Proven track record of building high-performance, critical infrastructure. Deep experience in Rust is highly advantageous, but strong engineers from other systems backgrounds (such as Go, C++, or Java/Scala) who can rapidly adapt to Rust will be fully considered.
• Thorough understanding of consistency models, idempotency, fault tolerance, and sagas, with experience designing systems that remain correct under partial failure conditions.
• Prior experience in payments, fintech, high-throughput transaction processing, or another domain where system correctness is vital and "mostly works" is unacceptable.
• Deep knowledge of transactions, indexing, query/caching strategies, event streaming, and a strong respect for auditability and reconciliation.
• Natural adherence to secure engineering practices, including secrets hygiene, least-privilege access, and maintaining clean audit trails.
• Ability to make high-impact technical decisions independently, navigate ambiguity comfortably, and execute both high-level design and necessary reliability work.

Nice To Haves

• Deep Rust experience, open-source contributions, or performance optimization skills (profiling, reducing allocations, lock-free structures).
• Domain depth in payment rails (card networks, bank rails, chargebacks, open banking) or accounting fundamentals (double-entry ledgers, regulatory reporting).
• Experience building risk, fraud, or compliance infrastructure (rule engines, device fingerprinting, sanctions screening, KYC/AML workflows).
• Familiarity with crypto, Web3, or on-chain infrastructure (wallet infrastructure, stablecoin flows).
• A background in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, or observability.

Responsibilities

• Take full ownership of complex payment infrastructure challenges, carrying projects from initial architectural design through to production implementation and on-call support.
• Design, build, and optimize high-performance, mission-critical systems governing money movement, transaction processing, and ledgers.
• Develop resilient distributed systems using asynchronous and event-driven patterns, ensuring fault tolerance, strict consistency models, and exactly-once semantics.
• Implement robust database strategies, transaction management, and security protocols, ensuring absolute data correctness, key management hygiene, and comprehensive audit trails.
• Ship high-quality code to production continuously, balancing a bias for action with the deliberate precision required for financial infrastructure.

Benefits

• Highly competitive base salary.
• Generous equity and token allocation, offering direct alignment with the long-term growth and success of the platform.
• A culture that trusts professional judgment, providing the freedom to make critical decisions without layers of bureaucratic approval.
• The opportunity to build core infrastructure for a globally dominant platform shaping the future of digital interaction and decentralized finance.

What This Job Offers

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