Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention

Sardine; United States; Remote; USD 230,000 - 300,000; Full time

Benefits offered by this job

Generous cash and equity compensation

Remote-first culture

Home office setup stipend

Flexible paid time off

Job summary

Sardine is seeking a Senior Platform Architect to lead multiple engineering teams, shaping strategy for a real-time fraud platform. You will architect ultra-low-latency services, build a high-throughput rules engine, and design multi-cloud data access and caching layers.

You’ll mentor engineers and drive high technical standards across the organization. You’ll work in a remote-first environment with occasional in-person leadership meetings in San Francisco and Berkeley, contributing to a

Qualifications

• 7+ years of software engineering at Staff/Principal/Lead Architect level.
• Experience building highly available distributed systems with ultra-low latency.
• Hands-on with stream processing frameworks in production.
• Polyglot persistence across Document/Wide-Column/Relational databases.

Responsibilities

• Act as the overarching technical leader for multiple teams and align platform strategy.
• Architect and optimize ultra-low-latency backend services and a high-throughput rules engine.
• Design data access patterns, partitioning, and caching across multi-cloud databases.
• Develop robust pipelines for real-time feature computations and aggregations.
• Mentor senior engineers and drive high technical standards from conception to delivery.

Skills

Distributed systems

Low-latency design

Stream processing

Polyglot persistence

Platform engineering

Technical leadership

Architectural 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 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.

• We're a remote-first team spread across time zones, so no office to report to - work from wherever helps you do your best work. Just a couple of things to keep in mind: pay is based on where you're located, and you'll need to keep a home base in the country you're hired in. So while we love the "coffee shop today, mountains tomorrow" life, this isn't a passport-optional, work-from-anywhere-on-Earth kind of remote - think flexible within your country, not borderless.

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.

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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