Staff Software Engineer, Identity and Verification

Trustly•San Francisco, CA

4d•$218,000 - $328,000•Hybrid

About The Position

The Staff Software Engineer will own Trustly’s Identity and Verification domain end to end, including its architecture, reliability, production operations, and future direction. The domain includes consumer login and identity verification (including Self ID and Network Check), as well as account-ownership and holder-name checks using bank data. Checkout, Orchestration, and Risk call these services in the checkout path under strict latency and availability commitments. The role involves quickly learning a mature, business-critical codebase, using AI tools to map it and documenting it for future development. The engineer will partner with engineers across the Americas and Europe to transfer knowledge, then help hire and lead the team that will own the domain. The team is responsible for operating the services it builds, including on-call duties, SLAs, incident response, and root-cause fixes.

Requirements

Typically 10 or more years building and operating production software systems, including several years owning systems at staff level or equivalent.
Hands-on experience with payments, banking, or other financial systems where correctness, auditability, and uptime matter.
Experience carrying the pager for systems you built and improving them based on operational experience.
A track record of taking over an unfamiliar, business-critical codebase and becoming its owner.
Daily use of AI coding tools such as Claude Code, Cursor, or Copilot, with sound judgment about their appropriate use and the need for human review.
Strong distributed-systems design skills, including data consistency, idempotency, and concurrency.
Clear writing skills, particularly for reusable design documents and incident write-ups.
Production experience with Java or a comparable backend language.
Experience owning consumer authentication or identity-verification services in a regulated financial product where fraud, latency, and conversion matter.

Nice To Haves

Experience with ACH, RTP, FedNow, or open banking.
Experience helping build a new engineering hub or leading a major platform transition.

Responsibilities

Own the architecture, service contracts, and production health of Identity and Verification.
Operate the services, including on-call, SLAs, incident response, and root-cause fixes.
Meet service observability standards and improve service performance measurably each quarter.
Use AI tools to understand existing code and create design documents, interface definitions, and runbooks for engineers and AI agents.
Partner with engineers across the Americas and Europe to transfer knowledge.
Direct AI-assisted implementation by writing and closing implementation plans, reviewing output against requirements, and owning integration testing.
Help hire and shape the team that will own the domain.
Within the first year, help lead the team responsible for the domain.