Staff Software Engineer

Staff Software Engineers are the engineering backbone of their team. You’re the engineer everyone wants on the hard problems - the ones that need solid judgment, deep system understanding, and someone who’ll actually ship them. You’re hands-on every day: you design and implement the parts of the system that are too important or too tricky to leave to anyone else, you debug the production issues everyone else has bounced off, and your code is the model the team’s review bar is set against. You lead by example - your quality, your work ethic, and your AI-native practice raise the team’s by visible degrees over time. At Staff, “I shape direction but don’t really code anymore” doesn’t apply.

When the team hits a high-pressure moment - a major incident, a cross-functional escalation, a critical delivery - you’re the engineer the team looks to, and you show up regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend. The hours don’t matter; the outcome does.

You’re also the technical authority for your domain - its architecture, its standards, its debt. Architecture here is a writing job as much as a design job, but it’s earned through doing the work, not separated from it.

You know the domain’s customers and stakeholders, and the outcomes the domain is committed to. The domain’s KPIs are partly yours: not just system metrics like latency and error rate, but the customer-facing and business outcomes the domain exists to deliver. What You’ll Do:

• Ship the team’s hardest work hands-on - design, implement, review, deploy, and operate it through production.
• Set the team’s code-quality and design bar by example; your reviews teach, and your design feedback changes outcomes.
• Own your domain’s architecture - its structure, integration patterns, and standards - write the ADRs that document the significant decisions, and keep technical debt visible, quantified, and shrinking.
• Own the domain’s OKRs and KPIs alongside the team’s manager and product partners - system metrics (reliability, latency, cost) and customer-facing outcomes (conversion, time-to-value, satisfaction) - and frame technical investment in terms leadership can act on.
• Help the team improve predictability - scope ambiguity out before commitments, surface delivery risk early, and engineer away structural friction.
• Lead the team’s AI-native and agentic engineering practice - by your daily example, not by mandate.
• Own your domain’s delivery, reliability, and security; take part in incident response and on-call; bring rigor to postmortems and follow-through to actions.
• Lead during the team’s high-pressure moments - major incidents, cross-functional escalations, and critical delivery - regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.
• Mentor engineers toward design and architecture ownership; develop the team’s bench.

What Success Looks Like:

• The team’s hardest problems get shipped well - because you took them on, not because they got escalated.
• The team is more predictable on your watch, and its quality bar holds because you live it - reviews teach, escaped defects trend down, commitments hold.
• The domain’s OKRs and KPIs are met and understood across the team - system metrics and customer-facing outcomes both.
• Your domain’s architecture is documented and built within; your ADRs get cited; technical debt is visible and shrinking.
• AI-assisted development is the team’s default - visibly, daily, and with judgment - because you lead it.
• Engineers in your domain grow into design ownership; if you took a month off, the domain wouldn’t skip a beat.

• Roughly 8-12 years of relevant engineering experience - a guide, not a gate; we hire on demonstrated impact, not years.
• Hands-on credibility and strong work ethic - you’ve been the engineer everyone wants on the hard problems, and you got them done by leading through the work, not by exhortation.
• Comfort leading in high-pressure moments - and willingness to show up for them regardless of hour: outages, escalations, critical deliveries.
• Multi-year ownership of a significant domain, with a written decision history (ADRs or equivalent) others have built against.
• Product fluency - you can speak the language of the business, name the metrics that matter, and frame technical work in customer outcomes.
• Daily, judgment-driven AI-assisted development practice; the experience to teach others where AI helps and where it misleads.
• Influence without authority - standards adopted, conflicts resolved, engineers developed because they wanted to learn from you.
• Security and compliance fluency for systems handling sensitive financial data.
• A strong writer - at this level, architecture and engineering leadership are both writing jobs.
• The primary technology stack for the Partner Solutions team includes: Frontend: React.js/Redux Backend: Node.js, Kafka Data Layer: MySql, Elasticsearch, Redis, Snowflake Infrastructure : cloud-native microservices AWS, Kubernetes CI/CD: github/Teamcity/octopus

Nice to Have:

• Experience leading teams within fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.
• Experience improving engineering processes and team effectiveness at scale.
• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
• Advanced degree in a relevant technical discipline (e.g., Master’s or PhD).

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie., * Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.

• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Pulled from the full job description

• Employee stock purchase plan
• Health insurance
• 401(k) matching
• Paid time off
• Employee discount
• Vision insurance
• Health savings account, Compensation range: $168k - $192k We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs
• 401(k) match
• Employee Stock Purchase Program (ESPP)
• HSA and FSA options
• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Health & Well-being

• Medical, dental, and vision coverage
• Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
• Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
• Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement
• Leadership development programs
• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world’s most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table-stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified.

At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build modern commerce experiences at scale., Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.