Staff Software Engineer

Key Responsibilities:

• End-to-End Ownership: Take full ownership of complex payment infrastructure challenges, carrying projects from initial architectural design through to production implementation and on-call support.
• Core Payment Services: Design, build, and optimize high-performance, mission-critical systems governing money movement, transaction processing, and ledgers.
• System Architecture: Develop resilient distributed systems using asynchronous and event-driven patterns, ensuring fault tolerance, strict consistency models, and exactly-once semantics.
• Data Integrity & Security: Implement robust database strategies, transaction management, and security protocols, ensuring absolute data correctness, key management hygiene, and comprehensive audit trails.
• Continuous Delivery: Ship high-quality code to production continuously, balancing a bias for action with the deliberate precision required for financial infrastructure.

Requirements:

• Strong Backend / Systems Engineering: Proven track record of building high-performance, critical infrastructure. Deep experience in Rust is highly advantageous, but strong engineers from other systems backgrounds (such as Go, C++, or Java/Scala) who can rapidly adapt to Rust will be fully considered.
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Thorough understanding of consistency models, idempotency, fault tolerance, and sagas, with experience designing systems that remain correct under partial failure conditions.
• Financial or Transactional Rigor: Prior experience in payments, fintech, high-throughput transaction processing, or another domain where system correctness is vital and "mostly works" is unacceptable.
• Advanced Database Fundamentals: Deep knowledge of transactions, indexing, query/caching strategies, event streaming, and a strong respect for auditability and reconciliation.
• Security-First Instinct: Natural adherence to secure engineering practices, including secrets hygiene, least-privilege access, and maintaining clean audit trails.
• Autonomy & Leadership: Ability to make high-impact technical decisions independently, navigate ambiguity comfortably, and execute both high-level design and necessary reliability work.

Preferred Attributes (Nice to Have):

• Deep Rust experience, open-source contributions, or performance optimization skills (profiling, reducing allocations, lock-free structures).
• Domain depth in payment rails (card networks, bank rails, chargebacks, open banking) or accounting fundamentals (double-entry ledgers, regulatory reporting).
• Experience building risk, fraud, or compliance infrastructure (rule engines, device fingerprinting, sanctions screening, KYC/AML workflows).
• Familiarity with crypto, Web3, or on-chain infrastructure (wallet infrastructure, stablecoin flows).
• A background in platform engineering, cloud infrastructure, or observability.

Benefits:

• Competitive Compensation: Attractive base salary coupled with equity and token grant allocations commensurate with experience.
• Global Team & Flexibility: Fully remote workspace flexibility, alongside optional access to physical collaborative hubs in New York City and Berlin.
• Health & Wellness: Comprehensive healthcare insurance coverage, complemented by a dedicated wellbeing allowance and gym membership options.
• Customizable IT Setup: Access to premium, top-notch IT hardware and equipment tailored to optimize the workspace.
• Professional Development: Generous annual development budget to enhance technical skills, attend global industry conferences, and participate in international on-site company events.

Due to the high volume of applications we anticipate, we regret that we are unable to provide individual feedback to all candidates. If you do not hear back from us within 4 weeks of your application, please assume that you have not been successful on this occasion. We genuinely appreciate your interest and wish you the best in your job search.

Commitment to Equality and Accessibility:

At MLabs, we are committed to offer equal opportunities to all candidates. We ensure no discrimination, accessible job adverts, and providing information in accessible formats. Our goal is to foster a diverse, inclusive workplace with equal opportunities for all. If you need any reasonable adjustments during any part of the hiring process or you would like to see the job-advert in an accessible format please let us know at the earliest opportunity by emailing [email protected].

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