Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Payments

Collectors Universe, Inc.; California (MO); Hybrid; USD 170,000 - 250,000; Full time

Job summary

Collectors Universe, Inc. is seeking a Staff Software Engineer to drive the Payments domain end to end. You will own gateway integrations across Stripe and PayPal, ensure secure, scalable architecture, and lead cross-functional delivery across Payments, Marketplace, and Vault.

You will mentor engineers, shape data ownership and service boundaries, and work in a high-visibility role to elevate reliability and performance across the ecosystem.

Qualifications

• 8+ years engineering experience with multi-engineer projects.
• Expert-level backend in C# and .NET.
• Full-stack capabilities across React, Svelte, and TypeScript.

Responsibilities

• Own the architecture of the Payments domain end to end.
• Define multi-gateway strategy and migrations (Stripe, PayPal, etc.).
• Ensure PCI-DSS, tokenization, and webhook reliability standards.
• Lead cross-functional delivery across Payments, Marketplace, and Finance.
• Mentor engineers and establish observability and security practices.
• Contribute to AI-first tooling and coding best practices.

Skills

C#/.NET

AWS

Kubernetes

React

TypeScript

PostgreSQL

NoSQL

PCI compliance

Payments domain

Tools

Stripe

PayPal

Datadog

Terraform/CDK

DynamoDB

Job description

About Collectors

Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our growing team. Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder. Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items. We employ more than 3000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, the UK, and France.

As part of our interview process, we request that candidates have their cameras on during video interviews. This helps foster meaningful conversation and allows us to create an experience that closely resembles our standard working environment. Certain interview steps may take place by phone. For remote roles, and at our discretion, candidates may be asked to participate in an on-site interview as part of the final stages of the process. We understand there may be occasional circumstances requiring accommodation and are happy to discuss them as needed. Your recruiter will be able to clarify expectations and answer any questions you have.

About the Role

We are looking for a Staff Software Engineer to set the technical direction for our Payments team — a critical engineering domain responsible for building, scaling, and evolving the payments infrastructure that powers every transaction across the Collectors ecosystem. This team owns the full lifecycle of payment capabilities: integrating with and abstracting across multiple payment gateway providers (including Stripe and PayPal), supporting payment methods spanning credit card, ACH, and digital wallets, and building both the APIs that downstream services depend on and the web application experiences that customers and internal tools rely on. As a Staff Software Engineer, your influence extends beyond your team to the technology organization. You have expertise in the entirety of the Payments portfolio — how our services interact and how money and data flow between them — and you are building the same understanding of adjacent systems across grading, marketplace, vault, and identity. This is a high-impact, high-visibility role. Payments is the financial backbone of our marketplace — touching grading order checkout, vault and consignment transactions, partner payouts, and customer wallet top-ups. You will own architecture decisions, gateway strategy, and the quality bar for everything that ships. We believe there is significant value in onsite partnership and team collaboration, and candidates within 1-hour commuting distance of the office may be expected to work onsite most of the time. Additional details will be discussed during the recruiting process.

What You'll Do

Own the architecture of the Payments domain end to end: Hold expertise across the entirety of the team's products and services — C#/.NET payment services, the distributed event-driven systems they run on in AWS and Kubernetes, their relational and NoSQL data stores, gateway integrations, and the frontends they serve — including how they interact, how data flows between them, and how they fail. Architect for iterative, autonomous development and future scaling through clean service boundaries, contract design, clear data ownership, and well-sequenced migration paths. Set multi-gateway strategy and lead high-stakes migrations: Define the abstractions across payment gateway providers — Stripe, PayPal, and others — so that adding, swapping, or failing over between providers is a low-risk, well-understood operation; own payment flows from initiation through settlement, refund, and reconciliation; and drive gateway migrations, payment-method expansion, and re-platforming efforts with low-risk cutovers under live transaction volume, where correctness of money movement is non-negotiable. Set the bar for security, compliance, and resilience: Establish the standards for PCI-DSS practice, tokenization, idempotency, retry and webhook reliability, audit controls, testing strategy, and observability — then use operational data to drive stability and performance improvements, partnering with Security and Compliance to maintain and advance our certifications. Lead complex, multi-quarter delivery: Lead projects of moderate-to-significant scope spanning 1–2 quarters, coordinating engineers, stakeholders, and dependencies to a predictable landing; plan using an explicit value-vs-cost framework so urgency and prioritization are easily understood by team and stakeholders alike; and surface blockers and delays to the right people before they become surprises. Drive cross-functional execution: Translate business requirements into technical solutions and partner across Payments, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Finance, Security, and platform teams to deliver seamless payment experiences that connect the Collectors ecosystem — building a working model of adjacent systems, including CRM, identity, and data/ETL, that lets you catch cross-system risks early. Multiply the engineers around you: Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, and feedback; foster a culture of knowledge sharing and documentation within your team and with business stakeholders by initiating and facilitating meaningful discussions around complex issues; and build strong relationships with teammates, your manager, Payments' business and Finance stakeholders, and senior engineers across the organization. Lead an AI-first approach to building: Establish standards and guardrails for AI coding tools — code review expectations, testing requirements, security and IP hygiene — identify where AI agents accelerate payments work, and raise the org's collective AI fluency by sharing proven workflows and coaching engineers on when the tooling helps and when it misleads.

Who You Are

8+ years engineering experience, including demonstrated technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects. You have a track record of designing, shipping, and scaling products with measurable business impact at a high-growth company or a scaled consumer platform. Expert-level backend engineering in C# (.NET). You own complex API surfaces, async patterns, and data consistency in distributed systems, and you are recognized by peers and leaders as an authority in your domain. Full-stack range. Hands-on production experience across the entire stack — React, Svelte, and TypeScript frontends, API and service layers, data stores, and the infrastructure they run on — with the judgment to design and review at every layer, even where others do the bulk of the implementation. Deep payments or fintech expertise. You have owned gateway integrations, idempotency, webhook reliability, tokenization, reconciliation, and PCI compliance in production, and can reason about failure modes where money is at stake. Deep database and data-modeling expertise, both relational (e.g. PostgreSQL) and NoSQL (e.g. DynamoDB). Schema design, migrations, query performance, and the realities of shared-database coupling between services. Strong distributed-systems fundamentals. Service boundaries, API and contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling — designed and operated in production. Production AWS and Kubernetes depth, with infrastructure-as-code fluency (CDK and/or Terraform). A track record of raising engineering standards across testing strategy, observability, documentation, and incident response. Observability-first mindset. You instrument what you ship using Datadog or similar tools, build dashboards and alerting, and use distributed tracing to debug production issues. Security-minded. You treat payment security as a first-class engineering concern, not an afterthought, and partner with Security and Compliance to maintain and advance our certifications. AI-first engineer. Daily fluency with AI coding assistants and agentic tools (Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, or similar), experience integrating them into team workflows (CI, code review, documentation), and mature judgment about verification, security, and the limits of AI-generated code. Familiar with Agile/Scrum methodologies. You're comfortable working in iterative delivery cycles, participating in sprint planning, and adapting quickly to changing priorities. Influential communicator. Excellent written and verbal communication with technical and business audiences alike, with sharp analytical and troubleshooting instincts — you align engineers, product partners, and stakeholders without direct authority, make crisp calls, and bring people with you. Bias for ownership. You have an extreme ownership mindset and will wear any hat required to get the job done. You thrive in a fast-moving, self-directed environment — you set the bar, hold it, and take full accountability for outcomes. Passion for collecting is a plus.

We are committed to equal employment opportunity regardless of race, color, ethnicity, ancestry, religion, national origin, gender, sex, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, age, citizenship, marital or parental status, disability, veteran status, or other class protected by applicable law. We believe that a team that represents a variety of backgrounds, perspectives, and skills will better service the diverse community of collectors we support.

If you require an accommodation to apply or interview with us due to a disability or special need, please email [e-mail]

U.S. residents: for disclosures relating to personal information we collect during the employment application and recruitment process, please see our Privacy Notice for U.S. Applicants.

Collectors is the leading creator of innovative technology that provides value-added services for collectors worldwide. We grade, authenticate, vault, and sell millions of record-setting collectibles, all while modernizing and digitalizing the process to further our mission of helping collectors pursue their passions. We’re always on the lookout for talented people to join our growing team. Our services span collectible trading cards, autographs, comic books, coins, video games, event tickets, and memorabilia. Our subsidiaries include PSA, PCGS, Beckett, SGC, and Card Ladder. Since our founding in 1986, we have graded and authenticated millions of items. We employ more than 3000 people across our headquarters in Santa Ana, California and offices in New Jersey, Texas, Florida, Japan, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Canada, Mexico, Germany, and France.