Staff Software Engineer

Netspend•Austin, TX

11d

About The Position

Netspend Corporation is seeking a hands-on Staff Software Engineer to own its core card authorization platform. The platform processes real-time debit and prepaid transactions over ISO 8583 for networks including Visa, Mastercard, Pulse, and Fiserv, operating under strict latency budgets, high-availability requirements, and PCI DSS compliance. The engineer will lead a team while continuing to write production-grade code, guide the architectural evolution of network connectivity and authorization services, and serve as the primary technical contact for platform upgrades, network certifications, and production incident management. The role includes developing and operating high-throughput Java/Spring Boot services, modernizing the platform, integrating payment security capabilities, and collaborating with internal and external stakeholders.

Requirements

10–15 years of software engineering experience, including at least 3 years leading engineering teams or driving technical architecture.
Expert-level Java proficiency (11/17+), 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 patterns, the outbox pattern, idempotent consumers and 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, Schema Registry) and/or JMS (ActiveMQ).
Hands-on experience implementing resilience frameworks such as Resilience4j for high-availability systems running thousands of TPS.
Practical experience with CI/CD pipelines (GitLab CI/Jenkins), Gradle, static code and security analysis (SonarQube, SAST, Trivy), and test automation frameworks (JUnit 5, Mockito).
Exceptional verbal and written communication skills, including the ability to explain 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.
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 ability to architect 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 (PostChannel, BaseChannel), ISOMUX/QMUX, ISOServer, and Q2 configuration.
Hands-on experience with Visa Base I, Mastercard MIP/Debit, Pulse, or Fiserv STAR/Accel ISO 8583 specifications, including messages 0100/0110, 0200/0210, 0400/0420, 0800, and DE55 EMV TLV data.
Advanced Dynatrace use, including PurePath, Smartscape, and DQL, and Splunk use, including SPL query generation, alerting, and dashboards.
In-depth familiarity with ReentrantLock, StampedLock, distributed locks such as ShedLock or Redisson, Java 21 Virtual Threads, and Micrometer metrics integration.
Knowledge of EMV chip/contactless flows, stand-in processing, settlement, chargebacks, HSM integration (Atalla, Thales payShield), and key management (KEK, ZPK, key blocks).
Familiarity with Docker, Kubernetes, Helm, AWS (MSK, 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 act 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 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 eliminate race conditions involving balances and card states.
Build fault-tolerant systems using circuit breakers, bulkheads, time limiters, retries, and graceful degradation.
Drive platform modernization, including migration from Spring Boot 2.7 to 3.5/Jakarta EE, removal of legacy RMI/JMX remoting, and containerization for Kubernetes deployment.
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 create dashboards and alerts using Dynatrace and Splunk.
Lead incident response, root-cause analysis, and permanent remediation efforts.
Partner with Product, network and scheme partners, QA, and Operations on card network mandates, certifications, and release schedules.