Senior Staff Software Engineer

fis; United States; On-site; USD 206,000 - 350,000; Full time

Job summary

FIS currently seeks an experienced engineer to join a startup-backed team building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions. The role requires hands-on ownership from design through production, in a small, senior team working in our NYC office.

You will design and operate core banking services, workflows, and compliance layers at enterprise scale with strong emphasis on reliability, observability, and robust APIs.

Qualifications

• Deep experience designing and building complex distributed systems at scale.
• Proficiency in Go or another typed, compiled language.
• Experience with event-driven architectures and Kafka.
• Production ownership including on-call and incident response.
• Strong observability, reliability engineering, and deployment safety.
• Ability to explain complex systems clearly and work across teams.

Responsibilities

• Banking Platform Engineering: Build and evolve capabilities that bring modern banking products to life, including products, accounts, transactions, transfers, journals, balances, and compliance.
• Define APIs, events, and data contracts that connect capabilities into a coherent, auditable banking platform.
• Production Ownership: Own services from design to deployment and operation, including on-call duties and incident response.
• Architecture and Delivery: Design systems for correctness, auditability, scalability, and resilience at Tier-1 scale; improve testing, CI/CD, safe deployment, rollback, and recovery.
• Use AI-assisted engineering and automation to improve outcomes; mentor and share knowledge to raise technical capability across the org.

Skills

Go

Kafka

Distributed systems

On-call

Observability

CI/CD

Tools

GitOps

CI/CD pipelines

Job description

Job Description

Sits within a newly acquired startup building an AI-enabled, autonomous banking platform for Tier-1 financial institutions within the banking group. The team is small and senior, with high autonomy and accountability, and an engineer owns services through the whole life cycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation and continuous improvement. That includes on-call and incident response.

This is not a remote or hybrid role, the team works in person every day in our NYC office.

The role builds, operates, and scales the services at the heart of the platform - spanning Core Banking, workflows, and compliance. These systems define financial products, manage accounts, execute and record money movement, orchestrate banking processes, and enforce regulatory rules at Tier-1 scale. Requires deep experience with complex distributed systems, a correctness-first mindset, sound engineering judgement, and full end-to-end ownership from design through production operation.

KEY RESPONSIBILITIES

Banking Platform Engineering

Build and evolve the capabilities that bring modern banking products to life - from products and accounts through transactions, transfers, journals, balances, and interest, to durable workflows and compliance controls.

Define reliable APIs, events, and data contracts that connect these capabilities into a coherent, auditable banking platform.

Production Ownership

Own services throughout their lifecycle: design, implementation, testing, deployment, operation, and continuous improvement.

Participate in on-call and incident response, diagnosing failures across distributed services, data infrastructure, and event-driven workflows.

Establish effective observability, alerting, operational controls, and recovery procedures; learn from production incidents to improve reliability, performance, and operational maturity.

Architecture and Delivery

Design systems for correctness, auditability, scalability, and resilience at Tier-1 banking scale, making pragmatic trade-offs between delivery speed, operational complexity, and long-term maintainability.

Improve engineering practices across automated testing, CI/CD, safe deployment, rollback, and recovery.

Use AI-assisted engineering, MCP servers, agent workflows, and automated runbooks where they materially improve engineering or operational outcomes.

Contribute to team excellence through knowledge sharing, mentoring, and coaching, helping to develop technical capability and promote engineering best practices across the organization

REQUIRED EXPERIENCE & CAPABILITIES

Engineering Depth

Deep experience designing and building complex distributed systems at scale, using a strongly typed, compiled language. Go is preferred, but deep experience with a comparable language is welcome.

Experience with event-driven architectures and technologies such as Kafka or equivalent streaming platforms.

Strong understanding of concurrency, consistency, invariants, idempotency, failure modes, and distributed-system trade-offs.

Production Experience

Substantial experience operating and debugging critical systems in production, ideally including on-call and incident response across application, data, and infrastructure boundaries.

Practical experience with observability, reliability engineering, capacity planning, deployment safety, and disaster recovery.

Experience with automated testing, CI/CD, GitOps, and modern production-engineering practices.

Judgement and Communication

Practical judgement and common sense, with the ability to evaluate and clearly articulate architectural trade-offs rather than apply technologies or patterns mechanically.

Ability to explain complex systems in simple, precise terms and work effectively across coding, architecture, operations, and cross-team delivery.

Effective use of AI to amplify genuine engineering expertise, with human ownership of design, validation, security, and production outcomes.

IMPACT & SCOPE

Direct impact on core banking capabilities shipped to and supported in production for Tier-1 global institutions.

High autonomy and accountability within a small, senior team.

Ownership of mission-critical systems operating at enterprise scale.

WHY THIS ROLE

This role offers the autonomy, ownership, and technical depth of a startup, combined with the scale, stability, and long-term impact of FIS. Engineers in this role shape foundational banking infrastructure while operating with clear accountability, enterprise resources, and real-world production responsibility.

FIS is committed to providing its employees with an exciting career opportunity and competitive compensation. The pay range for this full-time position is $206,000.00 - $350,200.00 and reflects the minimum and maximum target for new hire salaries for this position based on the posted role, level, and location. Within the range, actual individual starting pay is determined by additional factors, including job-related skills, experience, and