Staff Software Engineer

Priority Technology Holdings, LLC• Remote, US,

8d•$168,000 - $192,000•Remote

About The Position

Staff Software Engineers are the engineering backbone of their team. You're the engineer everyone wants on the hard problems — the ones that need solid judgment, deep system understanding, and someone who'll actually ship them. You're hands-on every day: you design and implement the parts of the system that are too important or too tricky to leave to anyone else, you debug the production issues everyone else has bounced off, and your code is the model the team's review bar is set against. You lead by example — your quality, your work ethic, and your AI-native practice raise the team's by visible degrees over time. At Staff, "I shape direction but don't really code anymore" doesn't apply. When the team hits a high-pressure moment — a major incident, a cross-functional escalation, a critical delivery — you're the engineer the team looks to, and you show up regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend. The hours don't matter; the outcome does. You're also the technical authority for your domain — its architecture, its standards, its debt. Architecture here is a writing job as much as a design job, but it's earned through doing the work, not separated from it. You know the domain's customers and stakeholders, and the outcomes the domain is committed to. The domain's KPIs are partly yours: not just system metrics like latency and error rate, but the customer-facing and business outcomes the domain exists to deliver.

Requirements

Roughly 8–12 years of relevant engineering experience — a guide, not a gate; we hire on demonstrated impact, not years.
Hands-on credibility and strong work ethic — you've been the engineer everyone wants on the hard problems, and you got them done by leading through the work, not by exhortation.
Comfort leading in high-pressure moments — and willingness to show up for them regardless of hour: outages, escalations, critical deliveries.
Multi-year ownership of a significant domain, with a written decision history (ADRs or equivalent) others have built against.
Product fluency — you can speak the language of the business, name the metrics that matter, and frame technical work in customer outcomes.
Daily, judgment-driven AI-assisted development practice; the experience to teach others where AI helps and where it misleads.
Influence without authority — standards adopted, conflicts resolved, engineers developed because they wanted to learn from you.
Security and compliance fluency for systems handling sensitive financial data.
A strong writer — at this level, architecture and engineering leadership are both writing jobs.
The primary technology stack for the Partner Solutions team includes: Frontend: React.js/Redux, Backend: Node.js, Kafka, Data Layer: MySql, Elasticsearch, Redis, Snowflake, Infrastructure : cloud-native microservices AWS, Kubernetes, CI/CD: github/Teamcity/octopus

Nice To Haves

Experience leading teams within fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.
Experience improving engineering processes and team effectiveness at scale.
Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g., Master’s or PhD).

Responsibilities

Ship the team's hardest work hands-on — design, implement, review, deploy, and operate it through production.
Set the team's code-quality and design bar by example; your reviews teach, and your design feedback changes outcomes.
Own your domain's architecture — its structure, integration patterns, and standards — write the ADRs that document the significant decisions, and keep technical debt visible, quantified, and shrinking.
Own the domain's OKRs and KPIs alongside the team's manager and product partners — system metrics (reliability, latency, cost) and customer-facing outcomes (conversion, time-to-value, satisfaction) — and frame technical investment in terms leadership can act on.
Help the team improve predictability — scope ambiguity out before commitments, surface delivery risk early, and engineer away structural friction.
Lead the team's AI-native and agentic engineering practice — by your daily example, not by mandate.
Own your domain's delivery, reliability, and security; take part in incident response and on-call; bring rigor to postmortems and follow-through to actions.
Lead during the team's high-pressure moments — major incidents, cross-functional escalations, and critical delivery — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.
Mentor engineers toward design and architecture ownership; develop the team's bench.