Staff Engineer, Backend

Staff Engineer, Product and Platform (Payments)

Greenlight is the leading family fintech company on a mission to help parents raise financially smart kids. We proudly serve more than 6 million parents and kids with our award-winning banking app for families. With Greenlight, parents can automate allowance, manage chores, set flexible spend controls, and invest for their family's future. Kids and teens learn to earn, save, spend wisely, and invest.

At Greenlight, we believe every child should have the opportunity to become financially healthy and happy. It's no small task, and that's why we leap out of bed every morning to come to work. Because creating a better, brighter future for the next generation depends on it.

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to join our Product and Platform Engineering group(Payments team) and play a key role in shaping the future of our platform. In this role, you will help build resilient and scalable systems that power a high-volume payments infrastructure — operating at high availability and delivering sub-second latency at scale.

You will work alongside high performing teams to modernize critical parts of our stack while delivering new product capabilities. This is a hands-on role focused on solving core engineering challenges related to availability, reliability, throughput, and real-time performance. If you are excited about building fault-tolerant systems that process millions of transactions with speed and precision, we'd love to talk.

Technologies we use:

• Backend: Kotlin, Java
• RESTful APIs, gRPC
• AWS (EC2, S3, RDS, SQS)
• MySQL, DynamoDB, Redis
• Kubernetes, Ambassador, Helm

What you will be doing:

• Lead Technical Vision & Strategy: Drive the technical roadmap and long-term vision for Greenlight's payment platform, ensuring it aligns with company goals and industry best practices.
• Architect & Design Solutions: Design and implement highly scalable, secure, and resilient payment processing systems, including integrations with various payment networks, processors, and banking partners.
• Hands-on Development: Write high-quality, maintainable, and well-tested code, primarily in [mention specific languages like Java, Go, Python, etc., if applicable, otherwise keep it general]. You'll tackle complex technical challenges from end-to-end.
• Mentorship & Guidance: Provide technical leadership and mentorship to other engineers on the team, fostering a culture of technical excellence and continuous improvement. Conduct code reviews and provide constructive feedback.
• Drive Best Practices: Champion engineering best practices, including observability, incident response, disaster recovery, and security within the payments domain.
• Cross-Functional Collaboration: Partner closely with product managers, compliance, finance, and other engineering teams to translate business requirements into robust technical solutions.
• Incident Response & Optimization: Mentor the team to proactively prevent incidents, focusing on identifying and mitigating potential issues to ensure the continuous high availability and optimized performance of payment services.

What you should bring:

• Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science or equivalent
• Extensive Experience: 8+ years of professional software development experience, with at least 3+ years specifically focused on payment processing, financial technology (FinTech), or highly regulated industries.
• Deep Payments Domain Knowledge: Proven expertise in payment gateways, payment processors, card networks (Visa, Mastercard), ACH, real-time payments, and related financial protocols.
• Strong Architecture & Design Skills: Demonstrated ability to design complex, distributed systems with a focus on scalability, reliability, security, and fault tolerance. Experience with microservices architecture.
• Proficiency in [Specific Languages/Technologies]: Strong programming skills in languages such as Java, Go, Python, or similar. Experience with cloud platforms (AWS, GCP, Azure) and containerization technologies (Docker, Kubernetes) is essential.
• Database Expertise: Solid understanding of relational and/or NoSQL databases (e.g., PostgreSQL, Cassandra, DynamoDB) and experience with data modeling for high-throughput transactional systems.
• Problem-Solving Acumen: Exceptional analytical and problem-solving skills, with a track record of debugging complex issues in production environments.
• Leadership & Communication: Excellent communication, collaboration, and interpersonal skills. Ability to clearly articulate technical concepts to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Mentorship & Influence: A desire to mentor junior and mid-level engineers, elevate the team's technical capabilities, and influence technical direction across multiple teams.
• Here are a couple of ways to rephrase that to sound like a good to have rather than a strict requirement:
• AI Aptitude: A foundational to deep understanding of AI, and its potential to drive innovative solutions within the payment domain, would be a strong plus.