Staff Software Engineer UK

United States Digital Space LLC; Greater London; On-site; GBP 110,000 - 160,000; Full time

Job summary

United States Digital Space LLC is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams and engineering domains. You will shape technical strategy, guide architectural decisions, and help teams build reliable, scalable systems powering millions of payment transactions daily.

You will mentor senior engineers, establish engineering standards, and influence roadmaps with Engineering, Product, and Operations while delivering hands-on contributions to critical

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree in CS, SWE, IT, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 10+ years designing and delivering complex distributed systems.
• Experience shaping technical strategy and mentoring engineers.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy across engineering domains and cross-team initiatives.
• Shape scalable architectures that support long-term product and business goals.
• Translate complex technical challenges into clear, practical solutions.
• Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns, and best practices across teams.
• Identify and mitigate long-term risks around reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to influence technical roadmaps and delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and strengthen technical leadership across the organisation.
• Lead initiatives that improve engineering quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence.
• Contribute hands-on to critical systems where your expertise delivers the greatest impact.

Skills

Distributed systems

Technical leadership

Software architecture

Cloud platforms AWS

CI/CD

Mentoring

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or related discipline

Job description

At the company, we’re redefining what’s possible in the payments space. As the first truly global issuer-processor, we give banks and fintechs the technology and talent to launch and manage Mastercard and Visa cards at scale - across more than 60 countries.

Our advanced, multi-cloud platform delivers real-time data, unmatched scalability, and the flexibility of shared or dedicated processing instances. It's this global reach and innovation that sets us apart.

We're looking for a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams and engineering domains.

As an individual contributor with organisation-wide influence, you'll shape technical strategy, guide architectural decisions, and help teams build reliable, scalable, and maintainable systems that power millions of payment transactions every day.

You'll work closely with Engineering, Product, and Operations to solve complex technical challenges, establish engineering standards, mentor senior engineers, and enable teams to make better technical decisions with confidence.

What you get to do:

• Drive technical strategy across engineering domains and cross-team initiatives.
• Shape scalable architectures that support the company's long-term product and business goals.
• Translate complex technical challenges into clear, practical solutions.
• Establish engineering standards, architectural patterns, and best practices across teams.
• Identify and mitigate long-term risks around reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to influence technical roadmaps and delivery.
• Mentor senior engineers and strengthen technical leadership across the organisation.
• Lead initiatives that improve engineering quality, testing, observability, and operational excellence.
• Contribute hands-on to critical systems where your expertise delivers the greatest impact.

What it takes to succeed:

• Extensive experience designing and operating highly available, distributed backend systems.
• Proven success leading technical initiatives across multiple teams.
• Strong expertise in software architecture, system design, and engineering best practices.
• Experience with microservices, APIs, event-driven architectures, relational databases, and cloud platforms (preferably AWS).
• Knowledge of CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, containerisation, observability, and automated testing.
• Strong communication skills with the ability to influence technical decisions and mentor experienced engineers.
• Professional fluency in English.
• Java experience is highly valued, while experience in payments, fintech, or other regulated environments is beneficial but not essential.

Education and Experience:

• Bachelor's degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Information Technology, or a related discipline, or equivalent practical experience.
• Typically 10+ years of experience designing and delivering complex distributed systems.
• Experience shaping technical strategy, mentoring engineers, and delivering cloud-native software at scale.

At the company we value making a difference to the lives of the people who work for us and who live in the communities where we operate. You can look forward to working with a diverse, global team where Paymentologists at all levels play an important part in our global mission to advance the world through payments and make a difference on a global scale.

We are an equal opportunity employer committed to fostering a diverse and inclusive workplace where everyone can thrive. We welcome applications from people of all backgrounds and do not discriminate on any unlawful ground, including race, colour, ethnicity, sex, gender, pregnancy, marital status, family responsibility, age, disability, sexual orientation, religion, belief, language or HIV status.

the company will never request any form of payment from applicants at any stage of our recruitment process, including for applications, interviews, training or job placements. If anyone asks you for money while claiming to act on behalf of the company, please treat this as fraudulent and do not make any payment. All legitimate the company vacancies are advertised via our official careers page, and our recruitment emails are sent only from official the company domains.