Staff Software Engineer

Netspend•Austin, TX

31d

About The Position

Netspend Corporation is seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to own its core card authorization platform, a high-throughput, low-latency system processing real-time debit and prepaid transactions over ISO 8583 for networks including Visa, Mastercard, Pulse, and Fiserv. The platform operates under strict latency budgets, high availability requirements, and PCI DSS compliance obligations. The engineer will lead a team, guide the architecture of network connectivity and authorization services, and continue to write production-grade code. They will be the primary technical contact for platform upgrades, network certifications, and production incident management. The role includes designing and maintaining Java/Spring Boot microservices for authorizations and related financial transaction processing; managing persistent TCP connections to card networks; ensuring consistency across databases, messaging systems, and downstream services; developing resilient concurrency and fault-tolerance approaches; modernizing and containerizing the platform; collaborating on EMV and HSM integrations; maintaining PCI DSS safeguards; defining service-level indicators and objectives; and coordinating with product, network partners, QA, and operations.

Requirements

10–15 years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years leading engineering teams or driving technical architecture.
Expert-level proficiency in Java 11/17 or later, including java.util.concurrent, JVM internals, garbage collection tuning, and memory analysis.
Extensive hands-on experience with Spring Boot and Spring Cloud microservices, including Config, OpenFeign, Actuator, and Security.
Expertise in distributed transaction trade-offs, including 2PC/XA versus Saga, outbox patterns, idempotent consumers/producers, and delivery semantics.
Deep relational database skills, preferably Oracle, including JDBC transaction isolation, SELECT ... FOR UPDATE, deadlock analysis, and SQL query tuning.
Real-world experience with event-driven architectures using Apache Kafka (Avro and Schema Registry) and/or JMS (ActiveMQ).
Hands-on experience implementing resilience frameworks such as Resilience4j for highly available systems operating at thousands of transactions per second.
Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines such as GitLab CI or Jenkins, Gradle, static code and security analysis tools such as SonarQube, SAST, and Trivy, and test automation frameworks such as JUnit 5 and Mockito.
Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain complex technical trade-offs to engineers, product leads, and executive leadership.
Bachelor’s or Master’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, or a related technical discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
10–15 years of professional experience designing, coding, developing, and scaling high-throughput enterprise-grade Java/J2EE applications.
At least 3 years of hands-on technical leadership or architectural experience, including system design, leading 5–8 engineers, and setting coding and quality standards.
Proven track record architecting low-latency, mission-critical distributed systems operating under strict SLAs and high concurrency.

Nice To Haves

Direct experience in the Payments, Fintech, or Banking domain is strongly preferred.
Experience with the jPOS framework, including ISOMsg, custom packagers, channels, ISOMUX/QMUX, ISOServer, and Q2 configuration.
Hands-on experience with ISO 8583 specifications for Visa Base I, Mastercard MIP/Debit, Pulse, or Fiserv STAR/Accel, including messages 0100/0110, 0200/0210, 0400/0420, 0800, and DE55 EMV TLV data.
Advanced usage of Dynatrace, including PurePath, Smartscape, and DQL, and Splunk, including SPL query generation, alerting, and dashboards.
In-depth familiarity with ReentrantLock, StampedLock, distributed locks such as ShedLock and Redisson, Java 21 Virtual Threads, and Micrometer metrics integration.
Understanding of EMV chip/contactless flows, stand-in processing, settlement, chargebacks, HSM integration such as Atalla or Thales payShield, and key management such as KEK, ZPK, and key blocks.
Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS (MSK and IAM), and business rules engines such as Drools or Jess.

Responsibilities

Lead, mentor, and grow a team of 5–8 software engineers.
Set coding standards, conduct architectural design and code reviews, and foster technical excellence.
Own production health and serve as the primary technical contact for network certifications and platform upgrades.
Design, build, and maintain high-throughput, low-latency Java/Spring Boot microservices for authorizations, financial transactions, advices, reversals, and stand-in processing.
Manage long-lived client/server TCP connections to card networks, including sign-on/sign-off, echo tests, request/response matching, and automatic failovers.
Architect distributed transaction boundaries and data consistency across Oracle, Kafka, JMS, and downstream services using idempotency, compensation or saga patterns, and reversal handling.
Implement resilient concurrency models, tune thread pools and executors, control backpressure, use row-level or distributed locking, and prevent race conditions affecting balances and card states.
Build fault-tolerant systems using circuit breakers, bulkheads, time limiters, retries, and graceful degradation.
Drive platform modernization, including Spring Boot and Jakarta EE migration, removal of legacy RMI/JMX remoting, and containerization of microservices for Kubernetes.
Collaborate with Security and HSM teams on EMV cryptogram processing, CVV/dCVV/CVC3 validation, and HSM key management.
Maintain PCI DSS compliance, including PAN masking, protection of sensitive authentication data, secure logging, and secrets management.
Define SLIs/SLOs and build dashboards and alerts using Dynatrace and Splunk.
Lead incident response and root-cause analysis, and implement permanent remediations.
Partner with Product, network/scheme partners, QA, and Operations on network mandates, certifications, and release schedules.