Hiring Payments Engineers: The Complete Guide

# Payments Engineer

**Location:** San Francisco, CA (Hybrid) · **Employment Type:** Full-time · **Level:** Mid-Senior

## About [Company]

[Company] is a global marketplace connecting freelance professionals with clients in 180+ countries. We process over $800M in payments annually, handling everything from client charges to freelancer payouts across multiple currencies and payment methods.

Our payments team is the financial backbone of the platform. When payments work seamlessly, freelancers get paid on time and clients trust us with their transactions. When payments fail, everyone notices. This is critical infrastructure.

**Why join [Company]?**

- Work on payments at meaningful scale—$800M+ annually, millions of transactions
- Own critical infrastructure that directly impacts freelancer livelihoods
- Join a 12-person payments team within a 300-person engineering org
- Series E company, profitable, with strong market position
- Competitive compensation with meaningful equity
- Hybrid flexibility with SF office (2-3 days/week)

## The Role

We're looking for a Payments Engineer to help us build the next generation of our financial infrastructure. You'll work on payment processing, billing systems, payouts, and the financial ledger that tracks every dollar flowing through our platform.

Your code will move real money for millions of users. Reliability, correctness, and auditability aren't just nice-to-haves—they're requirements. You'll need to think carefully about edge cases, failure modes, and how to build systems that are correct even when things go wrong.

The ideal candidate has experience building payment systems and understands the unique challenges: idempotency, exactly-once processing, reconciliation, and compliance. You're meticulous by nature and find satisfaction in systems that handle money correctly.

## What You'll Work On

### First 30 Days
- Onboard to our payments stack, ledger system, and payment gateway integrations
- Understand our transaction flow from client charge to freelancer payout
- Ship your first payments feature or fix (paired with a senior engineer)

### First 90 Days
- Own a payments component (checkout, payouts, or billing)
- Implement a new payment method or expand to a new region
- Contribute to our reconciliation and financial reporting systems
- Understand our PCI-DSS compliance requirements and processes

### First Year
- Lead payments initiatives that improve reliability or expand capabilities
- Architect improvements to our ledger and reconciliation systems
- Mentor teammates on payments best practices
- Shape our payments technical roadmap

## Objectives of This Role

- Maintain 99.99% payment success rate for valid transactions
- Reduce payment processing latency (p99 < 2s for charges)
- Expand payment method coverage in key markets
- Ensure 100% reconciliation accuracy between our systems and payment providers
- Build monitoring and alerting that catches payment issues before users do

## Responsibilities

**Payment Systems Development (60%)**
- Build and maintain payment processing systems (charges, refunds, disputes)
- Implement subscription billing and invoicing features
- Design and build payout systems for marketplace sellers
- Build new payment method integrations (cards, bank transfers, wallets)
- Ensure PCI-DSS compliance in all payment-handling code

**Financial Operations (25%)**
- Build reconciliation systems that match our records with payment providers
- Implement financial reporting and audit logging
- Handle edge cases: failed payments, disputes, refunds, currency conversion
- Work with finance team on requirements and month-end close processes
- Investigate and resolve payment discrepancies

**Reliability & Compliance (15%)**
- Design for reliability: idempotency, retry logic, exactly-once processing
- Monitor payment health metrics and respond to incidents
- Maintain compliance with PCI-DSS and other regulations
- Document payment systems for auditors and compliance reviews
- Participate in on-call rotation for payment-critical issues

## Required Skills and Qualifications

**Technical Skills**
- 5+ years of backend engineering experience
- 2+ years working directly on payment systems
- Experience with payment gateways (Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, or similar)
- Strong understanding of database transactions and ACID guarantees
- Experience with financial data modeling and double-entry accounting concepts
- Proficiency in Python, Java, or Go for backend development
- Understanding of idempotency patterns and exactly-once processing

**Domain Knowledge**
- PCI-DSS compliance awareness and secure coding practices
- Understanding of payment industry concepts (acquiring, issuing, settlement)
- Experience with reconciliation and financial reporting

**Soft Skills**
- Exceptional attention to detail—payments bugs lose money
- Strong written communication for documentation and audits
- Collaborative approach with finance and compliance teams
- Comfort with high-stakes systems where correctness is critical

## Preferred Skills and Qualifications

- International payments experience (multi-currency, cross-border)
- Marketplace payments experience (multi-party, escrow, payouts)
- Subscription billing and recurring payments experience
- Experience with financial ledger systems
- Familiarity with fraud prevention and risk systems
- Background in fintech or financial services

## Tech Stack

**Backend:** Python (Django), PostgreSQL, Redis

**Payments:** Stripe Connect, Stripe Billing, Plaid for bank verification

**Ledger:** Custom double-entry ledger system, Apache Kafka for events

**Infrastructure:** AWS (EKS, RDS, SQS), Kubernetes, Terraform

**Monitoring:** Datadog, PagerDuty, custom payments dashboards

**Compliance:** Vanta for compliance automation, audit logging

## Compensation and Benefits

**Salary:** $160,000 - $210,000 (based on experience)

**Equity:** 0.04% - 0.12% (4-year vest, 1-year cliff)

**Benefits:**

*Health & Wellness*
- Medical, dental, and vision insurance (100% covered for employees)
- $100/month wellness stipend
- Mental health support through Headspace

*Time Off*
- Unlimited PTO with 15-day minimum encouraged
- 11 paid company holidays
- 16 weeks paid parental leave

*Professional Development*
- $2,000 annual learning budget
- Fintech conference attendance (Money20/20, Stripe Sessions)
- Internal payments knowledge sharing sessions

*Financial*
- 401(k) with 4% company match
- Equity refresh grants annually

*Workspace*
- $1,500 home office setup allowance
- Hybrid work (2-3 days in SF office)
- MacBook Pro and equipment of choice

## Engineering Culture

**How we work:**
- Correctness over speed—we don't "move fast and break things" with money
- Comprehensive testing for all payment paths
- Code review required, with extra scrutiny for payment-critical code
- Detailed audit logging for compliance and debugging
- Blameless post-mortems with focus on system improvements

**What we value:**
- Reliability obsession—payments must work every time
- Attention to edge cases—the weird scenarios cause the biggest problems
- Clear communication with finance and compliance
- Pride in building systems that handle money correctly
- Work-life balance (on-call is rare and well-supported)

## Interview Process

Our interview process typically takes 2 weeks.

- **Step 1: Recruiter Screen** (30 min)
  Background discussion and role overview.

- **Step 2: Technical Screen** (60 min)
  Backend engineering fundamentals with a payments engineer. We'll discuss your experience with payment systems and approach to reliability.

- **Step 3: Payments Deep Dive** (90 min)
  Technical discussion about payment system design, edge cases, and failure modes. How would you handle specific payment scenarios?

- **Step 4: System Design** (90 min)
  Design a payment system component: checkout flow, payout system, or ledger. Focus on correctness, reliability, and edge cases.

- **Step 5: Team Interviews** (2 x 30 min)
  Meet potential teammates, including someone from finance. Discussion about collaboration and working style.

- **Step 6: Hiring Manager** (30 min)
  Career goals and final questions.

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*[Company] is an equal opportunity employer.*