Staff Software Engineer - Payment Processing

About the role

Company Description

We’re http://checkout.comCheckout.com http://Checkout.com. You might not know our name, but companies like eBay, Spotify, Klarna, Uber, and Sony do, because we’re behind many of the digital experiences you use every day.

We are where the world checks out, enabling over 10 billion transactions yearly for more than one billion global shoppers.

Whether you want to book a holiday, order food, renew a subscription, or check out online, there’s a good chance our tech powers the payments behind the scenes. Our platform helps the most ambitious businesses deliver effortless digital experiences, at scale.

If you want to do career-defining work, you’ve come to the right place. We move fast, think globally, and believe great teams are built by hiring exceptional people with conviction, curiosity, and the desire to make an impact.

With 20 offices across six continents and London as our HQ, we’re shaping the future of fintech – and we’re just getting started.

As a Staff Engineer (Payment Processing) at Checkout.com http://Checkout.com, you will set the technical direction for our Gateway, Routing and Payout platforms. Every payment and payout we process passes through these systems, from the merchant's API request to the routing decision that sends it to the right acquirer, payment method or payout rail. Correctness matters on every transaction, and small changes in availability, latency or routing quality show up directly in our merchants' approval rates and revenue.

This is a role for engineers who are energised by scale and by the hard trade-offs that come with it: latency budgets on the authorisation path, failure domains and blast radius, consistency and idempotency across regions, and the operational reality of running critical infrastructure around the clock.

You will operate as a force multiplier across multiple teams - shaping architecture, raising the engineering bar, and turning ambiguous, business-critical problems into designs that can be delivered incrementally. We're looking for individuals with deep technical judgement, strong ownership, and a pragmatic approach to breaking big problems into smaller iterations that deliver value continuously.

How you'll make an impact

- Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, defining the service boundaries, data models and integration patterns that let them scale by an order of magnitude

- Design for resilience from first principles - redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency and recovery - so that partial failures never become customer-facing outages

- Set and defend the non-functional requirements that matter: availability targets, latency percentiles, throughput ceilings, data durability and recovery objectives

- Lead the hardest technical decisions end to end, from problem framing and design review through to production rollout, migration and decommissioning of what came before