Staff Software Engineer, Backend

📋 Description

• • Lead the technical strategy for backend systems across multiple engineering teams, driving architecture decisions and hands-on implementation for Primer’s global payments infrastructure.
• • Design, own, and scale core backend services that handle high-volume, low-latency transactions with reliability and performance as non-negotiable requirements.
• • Serve as the technical authority for third-party PSP (Payment Service Provider) integrations, defining how external partners connect to Primer’s platform and elevating standards for seamless integration.
• • Influence and mentor engineers across teams without direct managerial authority, shaping technical direction through code reviews, design discussions, and collaborative problem-solving.
• • Proactively identify and resolve cross-team technical dependencies before they impede progress or create bottlenecks in product delivery.
• • Champion and enforce modern engineering practices including Behavior-Driven Development (BDD), Test-Driven Development (TDD), and comprehensive documentation across all backend systems.
• • Partner directly with Product teams to inform roadmap decisions by translating technical constraints, opportunities, and trade-offs into clear, actionable insights for non-technical stakeholders.
• • Maintain a high standard of code quality and system resilience, ensuring that systems scale gracefully under global transaction loads and remain maintainable over time.
• • Drive adoption of best practices in distributed systems design, including fault tolerance, idempotency, data consistency, and observability.
• • Act as a trusted technical advisor to engineering teams, earning influence through deep expertise, sound judgment, and clear communication rather than title or hierarchy.
• • Collaborate with global teams to ensure alignment on technical priorities, tooling standards, and operational excellence in a fully remote environment.
• • Participate in shaping engineering culture by promoting psychological safety, continuous learning, and a focus on meaningful impact over busywork.
• • Engage in the interview process by evaluating technical candidates through contextual challenges and assessing alignment with Primer’s engineering values.
• • Remain deeply hands-on with code and system design while also thinking strategically about long-term system evolution and architectural debt.
• • Communicate complex technical concepts effectively to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders, including product managers and finance teams.
• • Embrace ambiguity and evolving priorities in a fast-moving startup environment, adapting technical plans as business needs shift without sacrificing core system integrity.
• • Contribute to incident response and post-mortem processes, ensuring lessons learned are documented and applied to prevent recurrence.
• • Advocate for developer experience improvements, including tooling, automation, and platform stability to empower other engineers to ship faster and safer.
• • Work within a globally distributed team, coordinating across time zones to ensure continuous progress and effective collaboration without physical co-location.
• • Maintain a strong focus on customer impact — understanding how backend performance directly influences merchant success and payment reliability worldwide.