Staff Engineer

Zip Co is a global Buy Now, Pay Later company offering innovative payment solutions. They are seeking a Staff Engineer to set the technical vision, lead multi-team programs, and collaborate with leadership to enhance engineering effectiveness.

Responsibilities:

• Lead broad, cross-domain engineering programs spanning multiple teams, systems, and product surfaces from ideation through launch
• Architect and refine shared technical frameworks and patterns that help teams deliver scalable, dependable, and maintainable solutions
• Translate complex, ambiguous challenges into well-defined technical strategies and actionable, multi-team execution plans
• Drive technical decisions for high-impact or high-risk initiatives, balancing immediate delivery needs with long-term platform sustainability
• Foster cross-team alignment by managing dependencies, evaluating tradeoffs, and maintaining architectural coherence at scale
• Support and mentor tech leads and senior engineers in system design, planning, and leadership while preserving team ownership
• Work closely with product and engineering leaders to convert business priorities into aligned technical roadmaps
• Advance engineering excellence across reliability, performance, quality, and developer experience
• Shape engineering standards and best practices through active design participation, code reviews, and technical forums

Requirements:

• 12–15 years of professional software engineering experience, including time in senior or staff-level individual contributor roles within modern engineering organizations
• Demonstrated success leading cross-team or cross-domain technical efforts, such as significant product launches, platform transformations, or complex migrations
• Strong background in system architecture and design, with experience building and operating scalable, distributed, highly reliable production systems
• Hands-on technical leadership with continued involvement in architecture, implementation, and key technical decisions
• Deep expertise in modern backend ecosystems, including Azure or AWS, C#/.NET or similar technologies, and distributed system design leveraging domain-driven design, microservices, and event-driven patterns
• Ability to influence without formal authority, bringing multiple teams and stakeholders into alignment around a shared technical direction
• Experience collaborating with engineering managers and product leaders to translate strategy into executable roadmaps
• Practical judgment in balancing near-term delivery with long-term technical sustainability, including managing risk and technical debt
• Track record of mentoring senior engineers and tech leads, raising standards for technical quality and decision-making across teams
• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or equivalent practical experience (advanced degrees optional)
• AI Component – Proven ability to guide and scale AI-enabled engineering practices, partnering with tech leads and teams to integrate AI into everyday workflows and delivery processes, while measuring and improving metrics such as cycle time, quality, and developer productivity
• Experience developing and scaling systems within fintech or other highly regulated industries (e.g., payments, lending, banking)
• Understanding of security, compliance, audit, and data protection requirements in regulated environments
• Experience working with high-availability, high-throughput systems where accuracy and resilience are essential