Staff Software Engineer - Migrations

Paymentology; Dublin; Remote; EUR 120,000 - 170,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Remote work option

Global team

Engineering culture of excellence

Career progression toward Principal

Job summary

Paymentology is seeking a Staff Engineer to lead the technical direction of our backend platform, focusing on reliability, scalability and developer productivity.

You will drive architectures for multi-team initiatives, mentor senior engineers, and partner with product, operations and security to deliver critical systems. This role offers remote work with global teams and opportunities to influence engineering practice across the company.

Qualifications

• Extensive experience designing and operating backend or distributed systems.
• Proven track record leading multi-team technical initiatives.
• Strong architectural judgement and cloud experience.
• Excellent communication to technical and non-technical audiences.
• Fluency in English.

Responsibilities

• Drive technical strategy for large engineering domains.
• Translate complex problems into clear delivery plans.
• Shape architectures to meet long-term needs.
• Mentor senior engineers and lead cross-team initiatives.
• Raise testing, observability, and incident readiness.

Skills

Technical leadership

System architecture

Java backend

Cloud AWS

Microservices

CI/CD

Observability

Mentoring engineers

Cross-team collaboration

Testing & quality

Tools

AWS

Docker

Kubernetes

CI/CD pipelines

SQL databases

Job description

Unstoppable starts with people. The future of payments is being built today, and at Paymentology, we are looking for people who want to help shape it. We power card issuing for leading banks, fintechs and digital brands across the globe, and as we continue to grow, we are looking for curious, ambitious people who thrive on solving complex challenges, embrace innovation and want to make a tangible impact at global scale.

We’re currently in the middle of rolling out our new strategic card issuing platform, it conforms to all the best practices that you’d expect from a cloud native product.

In your role you would bring your engineering mindset and help mature our ability to move customers from our current platforms into the new one. This is a complex journey, but you will not work on this alone as you’d join a team of client migrations experts.

We believe that you bring your technical leadership and challenge the status quo to make the processes fully automatic. In this role you also have access to a wide array of SMEs across the organisation.

Success in this role will not just be moving the needle for Paymentology as a company but creating a strong foundation for our success in the future.

What You’ll Do

• Drive the technical strategy for a significant engineering domain or cross-team initiative.
• Translate large, ambiguous or unfamiliar problems into a clear technical direction and an achievable delivery approach.
• Shape architectures that support Paymentology’s long-term product and business needs.
• Evaluate complex technical trade-offs and communicate clear, evidence-based recommendations.
• Create architectural patterns, engineering standards and sensible defaults that can be adopted across teams.
• Identify and mitigate long-term risks relating to reliability, scalability, security, maintainability and operational complexity.
• Ensure dependencies and technical decisions are understood and aligned across teams.
• Partner with Product, Engineering, Operations and other stakeholders to inform roadmaps and delivery decisions.
• Unblock teams working through particularly difficult technical or organisational challenges.
• Mentor senior engineers and help them develop their technical leadership, decision-making and system-design capabilities.
• Lead working groups and cross-team initiatives that improve Paymentology’s wider engineering capability.
• Raise the standard of testing, observability, code quality, incident response and operational readiness.
• Contribute directly to critical systems when hands-on technical involvement is the most effective way to make progress.
• Help teams navigate complex situations with clarity, empathy and accountability.

What We’re Looking For

• Extensive experience designing, building and operating complex backend or distributed systems. (As a guide, multiple projects with 10+ years of experience. Proving experience designing, building and operating highly availability, high throughput, business critical systems)
• A record of leading significant technical initiatives involving multiple teams or systems.
• The ability to establish technical direction without relying on formal authority.
• Strong architectural judgement and the ability to balance immediate delivery with longer-term sustainability.
• Experience breaking down ambiguous problems and creating alignment around practical solutions.
• A deep understanding of software design, system architecture and engineering fundamentals.
• Experience with microservices, APIs and event-driven architectures.
• Strong knowledge of relational databases, data modelling and system performance.
• Experience building and operating software in cloud environments, preferably AWS.
• An understanding of containerisation, CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability and modern operational practices.
• A strong approach to automated testing and building quality into the development lifecycle.
• Experience improving the reliability, scalability and maintainability of production systems.
• The ability to explain complex technical topics clearly to both technical and non-technical audiences.
• Experience coaching and mentoring experienced engineers.
• A collaborative and pragmatic approach, with the confidence to challenge decisions constructively.
• Professional fluency in English, our shared company language.

Our primary backend technology is Java, and we are moving towards Java 21. Deep Java experience is valuable, but we also recognise that excellent engineers can transfer their knowledge between languages and technology stacks.

Experience in payments, fintech or another high-throughput or regulated environment would be useful, but it is not essential.

What Success Looks Like

As a Staff Engineer, your impact will be visible in the effectiveness of the teams around you. Technical decisions will be clearer, teams will be better aligned and difficult initiatives will move forward with fewer surprises.

You’ll help Paymentology anticipate technical risks rather than simply react to them. The architectures, standards and practices you establish will enable multiple teams to deliver better software, while the engineers you support will become stronger technical leaders themselves.

Why Join Paymentology

• Work on real-time payment systems operating at a genuinely global scale.
• Influence the technical direction of a growing international engineering organisation.
• Solve complex distributed-system challenges in a business-critical environment.
• Work remotely as part of a diverse, globally distributed team.
• Continue growing along our individual contributor career path towards Principal Engineer.
• Join a culture that values engineering excellence, accountability, collaboration and leading with humanity.

At Paymentology, we believe that making a difference starts with the people behind the work. You will be part of a diverse, global team of Paymentologists who are united by a shared mission to advance the world through payments.

This is an opportunity to contribute to meaningful work, collaborate across markets and functions, and help shape the future of a business with global reach and real impact.

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.

Paymentology 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 Paymentology, please treat this as fraudulent and do not make any payment. All legitimate Paymentology vacancies are advertised via our official careers page , and our recruitment emails are sent only from official Paymentology domains.