Staff Software Engineer (UK) — Lead Scalable Payments

Paymentology; United Kingdom; On-site; GBP 120,000 - 180,000; Full time

Job summary

Paymentology is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams and domains. You will shape technical strategy, guide architectures, and help teams build reliable, scalable systems powering millions of payments daily.

You will mentor senior engineers, establish standards, and drive initiatives for observability, testing, and operational excellence while contributing hands-on where your expertise has the greatest impact.

Qualifications

• Bachelor's degree or equivalent practical experience in a software field.
• Typically 10+ years delivering complex distributed systems.
• Experience shaping technical strategy and mentoring engineers.
• Cloud-native software delivery, preferably on AWS, at scale.

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.
• Identify and mitigate long-term risks around reliability, scalability, security, and maintainability.
• Partner with Engineering, Product, and Operations to influence 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 impact.

Skills

Distributed backend systems

Technical leadership

Software architecture

System design

CI/CD

Infrastructure as Code

Containerisation

Observability

Automated testing

Java

English fluency

Payments domain knowledge

Education

Bachelor's degree in Computer Science or related field

Typically 10+ years of distributed systems experience

Tools

AWS

CI/CD tooling

Infrastructure as Code

Observability tooling

Job description

Paymentology is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to provide technical leadership across multiple teams and domains. You will shape technical strategy, guide architectures, and help teams build reliable, scalable systems powering millions of payments daily.

You will mentor senior engineers, establish standards, and drive initiatives for observability, testing, and operational excellence while contributing hands-on where your expertise has the greatest impact.