Staff Engineer

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Staff Engineer - Trust & Vault based in Germany.

Join a senior engineering role focused on protecting sensitive payment data and improving transaction performance at global scale.

• Own the technical architecture and long-term direction of the Trust & Vault domain, covering card vaulting, tokenization, authentication, payment optimization, account updater capabilities, and portfolio migration.
• Design and evolve secure systems for tokenizing, storing, and retrieving sensitive card data within PCI-compliant boundaries.
• Architect and develop authentication capabilities such as 3DS/SCA and network tokenization to strengthen transaction security while minimizing customer friction.
• Build payment optimization capabilities designed to improve authorization and acceptance rates through network tokens, account updater services, and intelligent use of vaulted payment credentials.
• Design and maintain resilient, highly available, low-latency systems suitable for a zero-tolerance-for-failure production environment.
• Establish clear, versioned APIs and event-driven architectures that support scalable and maintainable platform services.
• Champion a full-service ownership culture in which engineering teams design, deploy, monitor, and operate their own microservices in production.
• Ensure systems are designed for multi-tenancy, elastic scaling, automated observability, and strong operational resilience.
• Apply AI-assisted engineering tools across architecture, implementation, testing, and code review while helping establish effective practices for their adoption.
• Partner with Product, senior engineering leaders, and cross-functional technical teams to solve complex problems and remove organizational or technical silos.
• Mentor engineers, influence engineering standards, and raise the technical quality of the wider engineering organization.
• Drive technical initiatives from architecture through production, balancing feature velocity with security, reliability, compliance, and maintainability.

• Extensive software engineering experience with deep expertise in Go and/or Kotlin, supported by strong understanding of broader software engineering and full-stack principles.
• Proven track record architecting robust, scalable, and maintainable distributed systems, including event-driven platforms, APIs, and cloud-native or serverless architectures.
• Strong knowledge of software architecture patterns, engineering best practices, and designing systems for high availability and operational resilience.
• Experience building foundational platform capabilities or complex distributed systems, ideally involving payment tokenization, card vaulting, authentication, or PCI-scoped infrastructure.
• Strong hands-on experience with AWS and cloud-native services such as RDS, ECS, EKS, S3, or comparable technologies.
• Excellent automated testing practices across unit, integration, and end-to-end testing within Agile, DevSecOps, and CI/CD environments.
• Proven technical leadership experience, including mentoring engineers, defining technical vision, delivering complex cross-team initiatives, and helping teams improve delivery performance.
• Strong understanding of DORA metrics and experience identifying and removing technical or organizational blockers.
• Demonstrated preference for clean, modular, maintainable architecture and the judgment to balance compliance and reliability requirements against delivery speed.
• Advanced written and spoken English proficiency.
• Expertise in PCI DSS, card vaulting, tokenization, network tokenization, 3DS/SCA, or account updater services is highly advantageous.
• Experience improving payment authorization and acceptance rates through authentication, tokenization, or payment credential lifecycle management is a strong plus.
• Previous experience in payments or fintech, particularly at global scale, is preferred.
• Knowledge of performance optimization and efficient algorithms for high-throughput, low-latency systems is beneficial.
• Familiarity with static analysis and code-quality tools such as SonarQube and mature CI/CD pipelines is advantageous.
• Experience introducing engineering practices, standards, or technical improvements across multiple teams is a plus.
• Open-source contributions or technical writing demonstrating technical leadership are beneficial.
• Spanish proficiency is considered an additional advantage.
• Strong ownership, analytical thinking, communication skills, and the ability to operate effectively in a high-responsibility environment.

• Competitive compensation.
• Fully remote working environment with the flexibility to work from anywhere.
• One-time home office allowance.
• Work equipment provided.
• Stock options.
• Health plan available wherever you are.
• Flexible days off.
• Language, professional, and personal development courses.
• Opportunity to work on critical payment infrastructure operating at global scale.
• Exposure to complex challenges across payment security, tokenization, authentication, distributed systems, and clo