Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform

This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform based in India. This is a senior individual-contributor role shaping the architecture of a global commerce platform designed to operate at extraordinary scale. You will own critical domains spanning payments, subscriptions, catalog, pricing, inventory, fulfillment, tax, and reconciliation. The role combines deep technical leadership with hands-on engineering across distributed, multi-tenant systems. You will establish reliability, security, observability, auditability, and cost-efficiency standards for mission-critical payment paths. Working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Support, you will translate platform capabilities into dependable customer outcomes. You will also raise engineering standards through design reviews, technical strategy, mentorship, and developer-enablement practices. This is an opportunity to influence systems and engineering practices at organizational scale without direct people-management responsibility. This position is listed on behalf of a partner company, who manages all applications and next steps. Our partner is looking for a Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform based in India. This is a senior individual-contributor role shaping the architecture of a global commerce platform designed to operate at extraordinary scale. You will own critical domains spanning payments, subscriptions, catalog, pricing, inventory, fulfillment, tax, and reconciliation. The role combines deep technical leadership with hands-on engineering across distributed, multi-tenant systems. You will establish reliability, security, observability, auditability, and cost-efficiency standards for mission-critical payment paths. Working across Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Support, you will translate platform capabilities into dependable customer outcomes. You will also raise engineering standards through design reviews, technical strategy, mentorship, and developer-enablement practices. This is an opportunity to influence systems and engineering practices at organizational scale without direct people-management responsibility. Accountabilities Architect and deliver multi-tenant, highly scalable commerce services covering checkout, subscriptions, payments orchestration, invoicing, and tax, using clear domain boundaries and well-defined SLOs. Own API and schema governance, including protobuf and ConnectRPC conventions, versioning, compatibility, deprecation strategies, contract testing, and breaking-change controls. Design resilient payment and commerce workflows using idempotency, retries, circuit breakers, outbox/Saga patterns, graceful degradation, concurrency controls, and automated recovery mechanisms. Establish end-to-end auditability through append-only ledgers, immutable event streams, trace-linked entities, tamper-evident records, and accurate reconciliation processes. Define and manage failure boundaries across payment providers, networks, data systems, concurrency, quotas, browsers, and devices, including error contracts, compensations, backfills, and replay mechanisms. Maintain visibility across deployed services, workers, triggers, scheduled jobs, subscriptions, ownership, SLOs, runbooks, budgets, quotas, and infrastructure configurations. Lead observability practices using OpenTelemetry, RED/USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and actionable alerting focused on user-impacting issues. Drive production excellence through canary and blue-green deployments, automated rollbacks, chaos exercises, disaster-recovery planning, multi-region failover, and incident leadership. Embed security and compliance into platform architecture and CI/CD practices, with emphasis on PCI scope reduction, tokenization, secrets management, key management, data retention, and privacy controls. Create developer-enablement “golden paths,” including service templates, ADR/RFC processes, contract tests, linting, ephemeral environments, and performance-testing frameworks. Lead evolution of core commerce domains, reliability strategy, API and data governance, technical risk management, build-versus-buy decisions, simplification initiatives, and deprecation plans. Partner with cross-functional teams to translate platform capabilities and constraints into product roadmaps, go-to-market narratives, and reliable customer outcomes. Mentor engineers across teams, contribute to hiring and interview practices, shape onboarding and learning programs, and raise technical standards throughout the engineering organization. Requirements 10+ years of experience building and operating backend systems, including at least 5 years of hands-on Go development and 2–3+ years operating at Staff, Principal, or equivalent technical-lead level on critical systems. Deep expertise in protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, API lifecycle management, versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and tools such as Buf. Strong distributed-systems knowledge, including idempotency, deduplication, outbox patterns, ordering, backpressure, concurrency control, and consistency models. Proven experience with event-driven architectures on GCP, particularly Pub/Sub, Redis-based fast paths, MongoDB or Firestore, and ClickHouse for analytics and reporting. Advanced Kubernetes/GKE experience, including HPA/VPA, Pod Disruption Budgets, resource management, multi-region architectures, CI/CD, and canary or blue-green deployments. Strong reliability-engineering background covering SLIs/SLOs, error budgets, capacity planning, load testing, incident management, disaster recovery, and business continuity. Practical knowledge of security and compliance practices, including secrets and KMS management, PCI fundamentals, data retention, archival, and governance. Strong testing discipline across unit, integration, contract, property-based, performance, and deterministic-environment testing. Solid understanding of frontend/backend boundaries, with familiarity with Vue.js and TanStack Query and the ability to design performant, clean API surfaces. Exceptional technical communication and writing skills, with experience producing design documents, ADRs, RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates. Strong systems-thinking, ownership, and problem-solving abilities, with a track record of making pragmatic architectural decisions in complex environments. Experience working collaboratively across engineering, product, marketing, and customer-facing teams, with the ability to influence without formal authority. Nice to have: experience integrating payment service providers or local payment rails such as UPI, wallets, BNPL, cards, or 3DS2, as well as large-scale reconciliation. Nice to have: experience with active-active or multi-region systems, chaos engineering, traffic management, organization-wide OpenTelemetry, FinOps, and workload optimization. Nice to have: familiarity with PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and privacy regulations relevant to international markets. Benefits Remote work opportunity from India. Opportunity to shape a global commerce and payments platform operating at significant scale. High-impact Staff-level individual-contributor role with organization-wide technical influence. Exposure to modern technologies including Go, ConnectRPC, Kubernetes/GKE, GCP, Pub/Sub, Redis, MongoDB, Firestore, ClickHouse, and OpenTelemetry. Opportunity to influence architecture, engineering standards, reliability practices, security, and developer productivity. Cross-functional collaboration with Product, Engineering, Marketing, and Support teams. Significant scope for mentorship, technical leadership, and participation in hiring and team development. Opportunity to work on complex payment, commerce, distributed-systems, and multi-tenant infrastructure challenges. How Jobgether works: We use an AI-powered matching process to ensure your application is reviewed quickly, objectively, and fairly against the role's core requirements. Our system identifies the top-fitting candidates, and this shortlist is then shared directly with the hiring company. The final decision and next steps (interviews, assessments) are managed by their internal team. We appreciate your interest and wish you the best! Why Apply Through Jobgether? Data Privacy Notice: By submitting your application, you acknowledge that Jobgether will process your personal data to evaluate your candidacy and share relevant information with the hiring employer. This processing is based on legitimate interest and pre-contractual measures under applicable data protection laws (including GDPR). You may exercise your rights (access, rectification, erasure, objection) at any time. #LI-CL1