Staff Software Engineer

VGS builds trust infrastructure and payment tokenization technology for modern commerce and agentic transactions. The Staff Software Engineer will architect secure, scalable Python and FastAPI services for agentic payment flows, define core APIs, and lead reliability, observability, infrastructure provisioning, testing, and cross-functional engineering initiatives.

Responsibilities:

• Architect Agentic Payment Infrastructure: Lead the design and evolution of Python 3.13+ and FastAPI services powering secure, production-critical agentic payment flows
• Define the Core API Platform: Design APIs and domain models for card enrollment, agentic token provisioning, purchase intents, mandates, device attestation, OTP flows, confirmations, and cryptogram retrieval
• Own Security, Reliability & Scale: Drive architectural decisions across security, scalability, availability, performance, and developer experience for sensitive payment and cryptographic workflows
• Build Deep Observability: Establish consistent patterns for error handling, traceability, structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus
• Automate Platform Provisioning: Design extensible provisioning workflows using Kubernetes APIs and Custom Resource Definitions
• Set the Quality Bar: Define rigorous unit, integration, acceptance, and end-to-end testing strategies for high-risk payment flows, including canary-safe production validation
• Lead Complex Initiatives: Lead technical design reviews, surface architectural and delivery risks early, and drive cross-functional initiatives from initial exploration through reliable production operation
• Pioneer AI-Native Engineering: Apply AI-assisted development and agentic workflows across the SDLC to accelerate prototyping, testing, refactoring, investigation, and delivery while maintaining a high quality and security bar
• Partner Across the Ecosystem: Collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, Platform, and external card-network partners to translate evolving requirements into secure, scalable systems

Requirements:

• 10+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments
• Advanced proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments
• Strong, hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions)
• Strong coding skills in Python to automate infrastructure and build operational tools
• Experience implementing Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry at scale
• Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought
• Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
• BA/BS degree
• A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
• Experience designing mandate, credential-provisioning, authentication, attestation, or cryptogram-based workflows
• Experience applying AI developer tools or agentic automation to day-to-day engineering workflows