The Job in Short

At Backbase, we build comprehensive payments functionality into our platform to empower banks worldwide. As a Technical Domain Expert (Staff Engineer Level), you are THE trusted technical authority for our broad payments business domain. Your primary leverage is acting as a force multiplier, applying your deep technical expertise and extensive Payments Domain knowledge to enable teams and deliver value in a complex business and technical domain.

Payments Domain Expertise

Extensive functional and technical knowledge of global payment rails, specifically covering US, European, and Asian markets
Deep understanding of payment workflows, compliance, and processing tailored for both Retail banking and SME/Commercial sectors

Meet the Job: Key Responsibilities

The Solver: Parachute into the hardest technical challenges spanning multiple teams to remove volatility and ambiguity
Design Ownership: Own high-level design for multi-service capabilities, ensuring security and scalability are embedded from the start
Technical Project Leadership: For large strategic initiatives, you step in as the technical lead, driving the architecture and execution strategy across multiple engineering team
Core Systems Prototyping: Write the complex cores and skeletal systems that other teams build upon
Execution Focus: You ensure the current quarter is executed with technical excellence
Bar Raising: Serve as the primary approver for critical-path design reviews and major technical initiatives
Technical Mentorship: Act as a dedicated mentor and coach for engineers, guiding their technical growth, fostering a high-performance culture, and helping to cultivate future technical leader

AI-Native Engineering & AI Agent Governance

AI Adoption: Lead the adoption of agentic tooling, and AI automation within your team to accelerate the development lifecycle
Tooling & Governance: Skill in selecting, configuring, and governing the use of AI tooling
Context Engineering: Advanced skill in configuring, governing, and providing detailed, context-rich inputs for AI agents
Harness Engineering: Advanced skill in engineering the AI agent's operational environment (the harness), ensuring it includes the necessary security, retrieval, and validation systems for reliable, high-quality code generation
Auditing & Validation: Crucially, the ability to validate and correct AI output for correctness, compliance with standards, and security before integration. The paramount skill is healthy skepticism and the ability to critically review and validate AI-generated code.

Hard Skills: Deep Software Engineering Foundation

As a modern AI-First Engineer, you are a deeply grounded software professional who leverages AI agents and tools to amplify productivity and quality, not as a replacement for fundamental engineering principles

Code & Architecture: Deep understanding and strict application of Clean Code principles, alongside mastery of SOLID principles to ensure maintainable, extensible codebases
Design Patterns: Expertise in classic Design Patterns and modern architectural patterns like Microservices, Event-Driven Architecture, and Serverless computing
Domain-Driven Design (DDD): Ability to apply Domain-Driven Design principles, including defining Bounded Contexts, Ubiquitous Language, and Aggregate Roots, to model complex business domains effectively
Testing & Quality: Advanced practice of Behavior-Driven Development (BDD) and Test-Driven Development (TDD), ensuring that requirements are defined by tests and implementation follows
DevOps & Infrastructure: Expertise in Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment (CI/CD) pipelines, infrastructure-as-code (IaC), and modern DevOps practices for automating the software delivery lifecycle

How About

You have 10+ years of experience with a strong track record in designing and delivering complex software system
You have a T-shaped skill profile, possessing deep expertise in one area with broad competence across the full stack
You excel at Influence Without Authority, shaping decisions across teams through expertise and persuasion
You are highly craft-focused and proactive in addressing cultural and technical debt
System Thinking: The ability to view the software product as a complete system, understanding how AI-generated components interact with existing infrastructure, security models, and deployment pipelines
Architectural Vision: The capacity to hold the overall system design in mind, ensuring that the piecemeal, task-oriented output from AI agents aligns with the long-term architectural goals and scalability requirements
Communication: Exceptional clarity in communication, especially when defining requirements for AI agents and explaining the rationale for modifications to AI-generated solutions to human team members

Staff Engineer (Payment Domain Expert)