Staff Software Engineer, Payments Orchestration: Transactions

Trustly
San Francisco, CA
Hybrid

Who this role is best for

Aimed at senior or staff-level engineers with payments domain expertise who can take ownership of complex transaction systems and thrive in a fast-growing, collaborative, and geographically distributed environment.

Best fit for

  • Candidates with 10+ years of experience in building and operating mission-critical financial systems
    — “Typically 10+ years building and operating production software systems”
  • Individuals who have successfully taken over and led teams for unfamiliar, business-critical codebases
    — “A track record of taking over an unfamiliar, business-critical codebase and becoming its owner”
  • Engineers comfortable with AI-assisted development and documentation practices
    — “Daily use of AI coding tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot)”

Things to consider

  • The role demands responsibility for on-call duties and incident resolution with no dedicated ops team
    — “Own the operation of your services: on-call, SLAs, incident response and root-cause fixes”
  • The role involves working with global teams across the Americas and Europe
    — “Partner with the engineers who run these systems today, across the Americas and Europe”

How to stand out

  • Emphasize experience with transaction processing and idempotency in your resume and interviews
    — “Experience owning transaction processing where correctness under concurrency and idempotency are critical”
  • Highlight your ability to create clear, reusable design documents and incident reports
    — “Clear writing. Your design docs and incident write-ups are the ones other people reuse.”
Pace · SteadyCollaboration · MediumAutonomy · HighDecision Impact · Team

Derived from job-description analysis by Serendipath's career intelligence engine.

What success looks like

  • owns Payments Orchestration: Transactions end to end
  • improves system reliability and operation in production
Typical background
10+ years of experience building and operating production software systems

Skills & requirements

Required

Payments OrchestrationDistributed SystemsJavaAI ToolsOn-call Production Support

Preferred

Open Banking PaymentsTransaction Processing

Stack & domain

JavaPaymentsBanking

About the role

Original posting from Trustly via Ashby

WHO WE ARE

At Trustly, we're building a smarter, faster, and more secure financial future by revolutionizing the world of payments. As a global leader in Open Banking Payments, we are establishing Pay by Bank as the new standard at checkout, providing unparalleled freedom, speed, and ease to millions of consumers and merchants worldwide.

Our Ambition: To build the world’s most disruptive payment network and redefine what the payment experience should feel like.

Trustly is a global team of innovators, collaborators, and doers. If you are driven by a strong sense of purpose and thrive in a dynamic, entrepreneurial, and high-growth environment, join us and be part of a team that’s transforming the way the world pays.

About the team

Trustly moves money between consumers, merchants and banks across the US. We are building our US engineering hubs in San Francisco and New York, starting with a small group of staff engineers who will take technical ownership of our most critical systems.

You will own Payments Orchestration: Transactions end to end: its architecture, its reliability, its operation in production, and where it goes next. You'll own the transaction path: the payments APIs (authorize, capture, deposit, pre-auth, refund, reclaim, refresh and retrieval), the transaction lifecycle and state, and how each payment is coordinated across account data, risk scoring and execution on the bank rails.

You'll start by learning a mature, business-critical codebase fast, using AI tools to map it and writing the documentation others will build from. Within your first year, you'll help hire and lead the team that owns it with you.

What you'll do

  • Own the architecture, service contracts and production health of Payments Orchestration: Transactions.
  • Own the operation of your services: on-call, SLAs, incident response and root-cause fixes. There is no separate operations team; the team that builds the service runs it.
  • Meet the observability standards set for every service, and make the service measurably better each quarter.
  • Use AI tools to understand existing code quickly, then turn what you learn into design docs, interface definitions and runbooks that engineers and AI agents can work from.
  • Partner with the engineers who run these systems today, across the Americas and Europe, to transfer knowledge.
  • Direct AI-assisted implementation: write and close implementation plans, review output against requirements, and own integration testing.
  • Help hire and shape the team that will own this domain.

Who you are

  • Typically 10+ years building and operating production software systems, including several years owning systems at staff level or equivalent.
  • Hands-on experience with payments, banking or other financial systems where correctness, auditability and uptime matter most.
  • You have carried the pager for systems you built, and improved them because of it.
  • A track record of taking over an unfamiliar, business-critical codebase and becoming its owner.
  • Daily use of AI coding tools (such as Claude Code, Cursor or Copilot), with clear views on where they help and where human review has to hold.
  • Strong distributed systems design: data consistency, idempotency, concurrency.
  • Clear writing. Your design docs and incident write-ups are the ones other people reuse.
  • Production experience with Java or a comparable backend language.
  • Experience owning transaction processing where correctness under concurrency and idempotency are critical.

Nice to have

  • Experience with ACH, RTP, FedNow or open banking.
  • Experience helping build a new engineering hub or leading a major platform transition.

WHAT WE OFFER

At Trustly, you will have the chance to solve meaningful challenges alongside some of the brightest minds in FinTech. Together, we are shaping the future of payments in an environment that celebrates curiosity, collaboration, and innovation. You will be challenged and empowered to grow, making a real impact every step of the way.

Our team is as diverse as the global footprint we serve, with colleagues across Silicon Valley, the U.S., Canada, Brazil, Europe, and beyond. At Trustly, we foster a workplace where everyone feels they belong—a place where teamwork thrives, ideas flourish, and we never forget to have fun along the way.

We offer innovative perks and benefits packages that include:

  • Flexible paid time off & generous PTO accrual plans
  • Comprehensive medical, dental, vision, and other insurances
  • FSA & HSA plans for medical and dependent care
  • Home office set-up allowance
  • Internet stipend
  • Retirement plan match for 401k and RRSP
  • Gender-neutral paid parental leave, and more!

(The benefits and total compensation packages outlined above are for full-time employees; some exclusions apply for temporary positions.)

At Trustly, we embrace and celebrate diversity of all forms and the value it brings to our employees and customers. We are proud and committed to being an Equal Opportunity Employer and believe an open and inclusive environment enables people to do their best work. All decisions regarding hiring, advancement, and any other aspects of employment are made solely on the basis of qualifications, merit, and business need.

Source: Trustly careers (Ashby)

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