Staff Software Engineer - Services Platform

Mercury • San Francisco, NY

2d

About The Position

Mercury's services ecosystem is reaching a transition where more of the company is moving beyond its core Haskell monolith, leading product teams to build and operate independent services. This creates infrastructure challenges related to service authentication, discovery, deployment safety, and health monitoring. This role is for a Staff Infrastructure Engineer to be a technical owner of Mercury's services platform, defining the standard for building and running services. The role requires deep technical expertise combined with strong judgment on standardization, flexibility, organizational influence, and building foundational relationships. The engineer will help define the paved road for building and running services at Mercury, acting as a trailblazer for future hires.

Requirements

• Deep experience operating Kubernetes in production and strong instincts around deployment architecture, failure modes, and migrations.
• Designed or materially owned service-to-service authentication, workload identity, service discovery, service mesh, or related distributed-systems infrastructure.
• Experience building self-service observability or operational tooling for application engineers.
• Strong opinions about platform design, paired with the judgment to know when not to build something.
• Think of internal platforms as products. Adoption, ergonomics, defaults, documentation, and escape hatches matter alongside technical architecture.
• Ability to gain alignment across teams with different goals and perspectives without requiring unanimity or creating unnecessary friction.
• Ability to communicate technical tradeoffs clearly enough that engineers understand both the decision and the reasoning behind it.
• Enjoy operating at the boundary between deep technical work and broad organizational leverage.
• Experience building an internal developer platform or service infrastructure at a scaled engineering organization would be particularly useful.

Nice To Haves

• We care more about the systems you built, the decisions you made, and whether other teams successfully adopted them than the logo on your résumé.

Responsibilities

• Define and build the platform Mercury engineers use to deploy, operate, and evolve services.
• Own the strategy for the service ecosystem at Mercury, including identity, authentication, discovery, and communication.
• Work with product stakeholders and Release Engineering to create a paved deployment path with strong defaults for rollouts, rollbacks, configuration, secrets, and operational safety.
• Help evolve Mercury’s service runtime architecture, including its use of Kubernetes, while keeping existing services healthy through the transition.
• Make observability self-service so product engineers can understand and debug their systems without routing every question through Infrastructure.
• Partner closely with Release Engineering, Security, and product engineering teams to create infrastructure that is compliant with financial regulations and useful enough that teams actively want to adopt it.
• Find the highest-leverage gaps in our services ecosystem and ship pragmatic improvements instead of waiting for a perfect future architecture.
• Establish patterns that let Mercury support many more services without multiplying operational complexity at the same rate.
• Mentor engineers and shape infrastructure thinking beyond the systems you directly own.

Benefits

• Base salary
• Equity (stock options/RSUs)
• Benefits
• Competitive salary and equity ranges within the SaaS and fintech industry
• Reasonable accommodations throughout the recruitment process for applicants with disabilities or special needs

What This Job Offers

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