Staff Engineer

Zip Co is a global ‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ company that provides simpler and fairer payment options for millions of customers. They are seeking a highly experienced Staff Engineer to lead complex initiatives in their real-time money movement and payments platform, focusing on system architecture and cross-team collaboration.

Responsibilities:

• Own the architecture and evolution of Zip’s real-time money movement and payments platform, powering millions of transactions
• Lead cross-team technical direction across distributed systems while embedding AI into engineering workflows and product capabilities
• Design systems that ensure safe, reliable money movement at scale across distributed services
• Define and evolve platform patterns for event-driven architectures and cross-team system design
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production across multiple teams
• Balance speed and long-term platform health in critical financial systems
• Embed AI into engineering workflows and help teams adopt scalable, repeatable patterns
• Raise the bar for system reliability, performance, and developer experience across the organization
• Build systems that ensure financial correctness under failure conditions, including retries, duplication, and reconciliation scenarios
• Help define how AI is used across engineering, from individual workflows to team-wide adoption and patterns

Requirements:

• 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed backend systems in modern engineering environments
• Strong experience in payments, fintech, or other correctness-critical systems such as settlement, reconciliation, or transaction processing
• Proven ability to use AI in a professional setting, both in your own workflow and in helping teams adopt AI-driven development patterns
• Experience leading complex, cross-team initiatives and driving technical direction across multiple systems
• Deep expertise in system design, including event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-availability systems
• Hands-on engineering mindset. You stay close to implementation and can dive into code, services, and infrastructure when needed
• Strong decision-making ability. You can evaluate tradeoffs and make clear technical calls in ambiguous situations
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS, and backend technologies like C#/.NET or similar
• Experience building and scaling systems in fintech or other highly regulated environments (e.g., payments, lending, banking)
• Familiarity with security, compliance, audit, and data protection requirements in regulated domains