Staff Software Engineer, Marketplace & Payments Systems

Zipline; South San Francisco (CA); Hybrid; USD 180,000 - 270,000; Full time

Job summary

Zipline is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Marketplace team. You will own production services in the commerce stack, including merchant portals, integrations, and billing backend, ensuring reliability across international operations.

You will drive improvements, data-driven decisions, and incident response, mentoring engineers while aligning with safety and regulatory requirements. Occasional travel to partner sites and after-hours support may be needed.

Qualifications

• 5+ years shipping production distributed systems.
• Shipped transactional commerce/payments or equivalent on a large scale.
• API design and data modelling for ledgers; idempotency and retries.
• Incident leadership with runbooks and RCA follow-up.
• Able to define and hit metrics with data and trade-offs.

Responsibilities

• Own production services end-to-end in the commerce stack.
• Improve onboarding time, reconciliation accuracy, and MTTR.
• Lead cross-functional launches with defined success criteria.
• Build marketplace controls and policy tooling for pricing and capacity.
• Ship partner integrations with SLAs and migration strategies.
• Maintain observability, SLOs, dashboards, and on-call rotations.
• Mentor engineers and drive durable architectural abstractions.

Skills

Distributed systems

Production ownership

Go/Python

React for merchant apps

SLOs/observability

Incident leadership

Travel willingness

Tools

Kafka

gRPC

PostgreSQL

AWS

Grafana

Honeycomb

Bazel

Job description

Zipline is seeking a Staff Software Engineer for the Marketplace team. You will own production services in the commerce stack, including merchant portals, integrations, and billing backend, ensuring reliability across international operations.

You will drive improvements, data-driven decisions, and incident response, mentoring engineers while aligning with safety and regulatory requirements. Occasional travel to partner sites and after-hours support may be needed.