Staff Engineer, High-Throughput Payments Platform

Checkout.com; Greater London; Hybrid; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Checkout.com is seeking a Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for high-throughput, low-latency payments platforms. You will shape architecture across multiple teams, balance trade-offs, and drive critical infrastructure with a focus on reliability and performance.

You will operate as a force multiplier, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring delivery of scalable, production-grade systems while maintaining strong ownership and governance across domains.

Qualifications

• Proven track record in building and operating distributed backend systems.
• Experience designing for high throughput and low latency.
• Strong knowledge of resilience patterns and failure handling.
• Proficiency in .NET or Java; production-ready code.
• Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures and scalable data stores.
• Cloud experience with AWS and Azure; containers and IaC.
• Ownership of production systems on call and incident response.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems and define service boundaries.
• Lead design reviews and drive production rollout, migration and decommissioning of systems.
• Raise engineering bar through mentorship, code reviews, and cross-team collaboration.
• Improve observability, monitoring, and incident response to reduce outages.
• Shape architecture decisions and communicate trade-offs to leadership.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

High throughput

Low latency

Resilience patterns

On-call ownership

Mentoring

Cross-team collaboration

Documentation

Architectural judgement

Tools

AWS

Azure

Containers

Kubernetes

Terraform

CI/CD

Job description

Checkout.com is seeking a Staff Engineer to set the technical direction for high-throughput, low-latency payments platforms. You will shape architecture across multiple teams, balance trade-offs, and drive critical infrastructure with a focus on reliability and performance.

You will operate as a force multiplier, mentoring senior engineers, and ensuring delivery of scalable, production-grade systems while maintaining strong ownership and governance across domains.