Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention

sardine; San Francisco, Berkeley (CA, CA); Hybrid; CAD 213,000 - 298,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Cash and equity

Remote-first culture

Health insurance (US & Canada)

401k/RRSP match

MacBook Pro at your door

Home office stipend

Meal stipend

Social meetup stipend

Wellness stipend

Learning stipend

Job summary

Sardine is seeking a Staff/Lead Architect to own platform architecture for real-time risk analytics across Consumer and Business Fraud engineering teams. You will drive technical strategy, design ultra-low-latency services, and mentor engineers across a multi-cloud environment.

You’ll shape data access patterns, streaming pipelines, and a high-throughput rules engine while advancing reliability, observability, and developer velocity in a remote-first, globally distributed team with regular

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering at staff/lead level.
• Experience building highly available distributed systems with ultra-low latency.
• Hands-on with stream processing frameworks in production (Kafka, Flink, SQS, Pub/Sub).
• Polyglot persistence across Document, Wide-Column, and Relational databases.
• Platform engineering mindset focused on reliability, observability, and developer velocity.
• Strong communication and cross-team consensus skills.

Responsibilities

• Act as the overarching technical leader for multiple teams, partnering with stakeholders to unify platform strategy.

Skills

Staff/Lead Architect

Distributed systems

Low-latency

Mentoring engineers

Platform engineering

Cross-team communication

Tools

Kafka

Flink

SQS

Pub/Sub

Job description

Who we are:

Sardine is the leading agentic risk platform for fighting financial crime. Our integrated solution unifies data across risk teams to help organizations stop fraud in real time, prevent AI-driven attacks, and automate fraud and AML operations. Sardine’s platform is strengthened by one of the fastest-growing fraud consortiums in the market, spanning more than 6 billion profiled devices, 800 million consumers, and 3 million businesses worldwide. Leading companies including FIS, GoDaddy, Intuit, Edward Jones, ZoomInfo, and Checkout.com rely on Sardine to secure and grow trust in their products.

Our culture:

• We have hubs in the Bay Area, NYC, Austin, Toronto, and São Paulo. However, we maintain a remote-first work culture. #WorkFromAnywhere
• We hire talented, self-motivated individuals with extreme ownership and high growth orientation.
• We value performance and not hours worked. We believe you shouldn't have to miss your family dinner, your kid's school play, friends get-together, or doctor's appointments for the sake of adhering to an arbitrary work schedule.

Location:

• Remote - USA or Canada - Given the strategic nature of this role, we expect a degree of flexibility for somewhat regular in-person meetings with our leadership team in San Francisco, Berkeley.
• From Home / Beach / Mountain / Cafe / Anywhere!
• We are a remote-first company with a globally distributed team. You can find your productive zone and work from there.

About the Role

You will serve as the technical steward and platform architect for both our Consumer Fraud and Business Fraud engineering teams. This position involves driving technical strategy, optimizing mission-critical infrastructure, mentoring engineers, and assuming broad ownership of a platform that processes massive volumes of data in real-time.

What you’ll be doing:

• Act as the overarching technical leader for multiple teams, partnering with stakeholders to unify platform strategy.
• Architect, design, and optimize ultra-low-latency backend services and a high-throughput rules engine.
• Design optimal data access patterns, partitioning strategies, and caching layers across our complex, multi-cloud database ecosystem.
• Develop robust pipelines for massive parallel execution of real-time feature computations and aggregations.
• Play a pivotal role in shaping engineering culture, mentoring senior engineers, and driving high technical standards from conception to delivery.

What you’ll need:

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, with a proven track record operating at a Staff, Principal, or Lead Architect level.
• Deep expertise in building highly available, distributed systems with strict ultra-low latency.
• Hands-on experience working with stream processing frameworks (e.g., Kafka, Flink, SQS, PubSub) in production environments.
• Advanced proficiency in polyglot persistence, with experience tuning data models across Document, Wide-Column, and Relational databases.
• A strong platform engineering mindset focused on reliability, observability, and developer velocity.
• Proficiency in communicating complex architectural concepts and driving cross-team consensus.

Benefits we offer:

• Generous compensation in cash and equity
• Early exercise for all options, including pre-vested
• Work from anywhere: Remote-first Culture
• Flexible paid time off and Year-end break
• Health insurance, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents - US and Canada specific
• 4% matching in 401k / RRSP - US and Canada specific
• MacBook Pro delivered to your door
• One-time stipend to set up a home office — desk, chair, screen, etc.
• Monthly meal stipend
• Monthly social meet-up stipend
• Annual health and wellness stipend
• Annual Learning stipend

Join a fast-growing company with world-class professionals from around the world. If you are seeking a meaningful career, you found the right place, and we would love to hear from you.

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