Staff Software Engineer - DevEx

Responsibilities

• Design APIs and domain models for card enrollment, agentic token provisioning, purchase intents, mandates, device attestation, OTP flows, confirmations, and cryptogram retrieval.
• Drive architectural decisions across security, scalability, availability, performance, and developer experience for sensitive payment and cryptographic workflows.
• Design extensible provisioning workflows using Kubernetes APIs and Custom Resource Definitions.
• Define rigorous unit, integration, acceptance, and end-to-end testing strategies for high-risk payment flows, including canary-safe production validation.
• Lead technical design reviews, surface architectural and delivery risks early, and drive cross-functional initiatives from initial exploration through reliable production operation.
• 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.

Requirements

• Advanced proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments.

Preferred

Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products

• 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.

Modern Tooling as Leverage

We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment.

Ownership of Outcomes

Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most.

Mission-Critical Accountability

We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy.

Learn More

See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices

About the Role

We’re building payment infrastructure for a world where AI agents don’t just recommend, search, and summarize. They transact.

The Agentic API is creating the secure backend layer that enables trusted agents to initiate purchases, operate within user-approved mandates, retrieve scoped payment credentials, and complete transactions without exposing raw card data.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll help pioneer a new category of payment infrastructure at the intersection of AI, card networks, cryptography, and secure money movement, building clean, reliable APIs for the next generation of commerce.

Architect Agentic Payment Infrastructure

Lead the design and evolution of Python 3.13+ and FastAPI services powering secure, production-critical agentic payment flows.

Build Deep Observability

Establish consistent patterns for error handling, traceability, structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.

Partner Across the Ecosystem

Collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, Platform, and external card-network partners to translate evolving requirements into secure, scalable systems.

Ownership at Scale

10+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments.

Containerization & Orchestration

Strong, hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions).

Automation & Scripting

Strong coding skills in Python to automate infrastructure and build operational tools.

Observability Expertise

Experience implementing Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry at scale.

Security & Networking Foundations

Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought.

Nice to Have

BA/BS degree

We're looking for passionate professionals who take pride in their craft and want to help grow a team tackling some of the most critical problems in payments. People who thrive here are curious by nature, unafraid of hard problems, and motivated by the chance to build something that matters at scale.

If you're driven to make a meaningful impact, work at the leading edge of payment technology, and grow your career alongside a team that values ownership, collaboration, and continuous learning, you'll feel right at home at VGS.

How We Work

At VGS, we embrace a remote-first philosophy because we believe flexibility leads to great work and a healthy work-life balance. That said, if you live within 30 miles of one of our office locations, you'll be on a hybrid schedule with some in-person time, because we know there's real value in coming together.

We're not about being in the office every day. We are about connection, collaboration, and the energy that comes from a great brainstorm, a team lunch, or celebrating a big win in person.

Our Benefits

Financial and retirement

Competitive salary

• 401 (k) with a 4% match and immediate vesting (applies to US only)
• Early equity
• Internet Stipend
• Learning Stipend
• Office set-up stipend (applies to US only)

Health and Wellness

• Insurance (medical, dental, and vision)
• HSA/FSA Options
• Life and disability insurance
• Pet insurance
• Vacation and time off
• Flexible PTO
• Paid national holidays
• Global parental leave program

Professional Development

• Promote from within
• Lunch and learns
• Team events and summits
• Office life and perks

Remote and hybrid opportunities

• Flexible working hours
• Weekly office lunches
• Employee discount platform

Equal Opportunity

We consider all applicants without regard to race, color, national origin, sex, age, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, veteran status, marital status, physical or mental disability, or other protected classes under all applicable local, state, and federal laws and ordinances (AA/EOE/W/M/Vet/Disabled).

Qualified applicants with arrest and conviction records will be considered for this position in accordance with the San Francisco Fair Chance Ordinance.

Where We're Hiring

We are currently hiring in the following locations: Arizona, California, Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Idaho, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Pennsylvania, Texas, Utah, Virginia, Washington, Ontario (Canada), Alberta (Canada), and British Columbia (Canada).

VGS-286

A Note on Our Hiring Process