Sr. Staff Engineer – Payments & Commerce Platform

About This Opportunity

Our talent team at Get A Job.ai is representing a confidential SaaS platform in their search for a Sr. Staff Engineer - Payments & Commerce Platform based in India. Our client operates a high-scale commerce infrastructure processing significant transaction volume across global markets. This is a senior individual contributor role with organizational influence—you'll architect payment and commerce systems, set technical standards, and elevate engineering practices across teams without direct reports.

Responsibilities

You will design and deliver multi-tenant, globally distributed services including checkout, subscriptions, payment orchestration, invoicing, and tax integration. Your work will establish clear domain boundaries using domain-driven design principles and enforce hard service-level objectives.

As custodian of API and schema design, you'll own protobuf and ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policies, deprecation playbooks, and breaking-change validation to ensure long-term contract stability.

You will guarantee resilience and availability of critical payment flows by implementing timeouts, retries with jitter, circuit breakers, idempotency keys, outbox and Saga patterns, hedged requests, and graceful degradation strategies.

Complete auditability is essential: you'll build append-only double-entry ledgers, immutable event streams, trace-linked entities using OpenTelemetry, tamper-evident audit trails, and cent-accurate reconciliation processes.

You'll own error boundaries end-to-end by enumerating failure domains across payment service providers, network, data stores, concurrency, quotas, and client devices; designing uniform error contracts; and implementing compensations, backfills, and automated replay mechanisms.

Service catalog stewardship includes maintaining inventory of all deployed components—services, workers, triggers, cron jobs, subscriptions—with owners, SLOs, runbooks, pod disruption budgets, autoscaling configurations, resource budgets, quotas, and timeout settings.

Configuration and limits management across the stack is your responsibility: enforce sane defaults for Kubernetes, Pub/Sub, Redis, document stores, and analytics databases covering connection pools, acknowledgment deadlines, batch sizes, TTLs, memory and file descriptor limits, and cloud quotas.

You'll treat observability as a product, implementing pervasive OpenTelemetry instrumentation, RED and USE metrics, exemplars, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and alerting that escalates only for user-impacting issues.

Production excellence includes canary and blue-green deployments, automated rollbacks, chaos engineering drills, disaster recovery playbooks with defined RPO and RTO, multi-region failover strategies, and participation in incident command rotation.

Security and compliance must be designed in from the start: PCI scope minimization, tokenization and vaulting, secrets and key management hygiene, data retention and archival policies, privacy controls, and automated security checks in CI/CD pipelines.

Developer acceleration work involves paving golden paths through service templates, architectural decision records, RFC processes, linting and formatting standards, contract testing, ephemeral environments, and load testing harnesses that make correct patterns the easiest choice.

You will lead core domain evolution from orchestration through ledger to reconciliation flows with crisp invariants and consistency guarantees—applying read-your-writes consistency where required and eventual consistency where appropriate.

Reliability strategy leadership includes defining SLIs, SLOs, and error budgets; capacity planning; cost and FinOps guardrails; multi-region posture; and disaster recovery exercises.

API and data governance covers canonical models, schema lifecycle management including compatibility matrices and migrations, plus data lifecycle policies for retention, archival, and compliance.

You'll provide practice leadership across the engineering organization through design reviews, postmortems, technical strategy development, coding standards definition, and mentorship that raises the bar for all teams.

Hiring and team growth support includes helping shape interview processes, evaluation rubrics, onboarding programs, and ongoing learning through knowledge-sharing sessions and design reviews.

Cross-functional partnership with product, marketing, and support teams will translate platform capabilities and constraints into roadmaps, go-to-market narratives, and reliable customer outcomes.

Risk and roadmap management involves maintaining a technical risk register, making build-versus-buy decisions, and proposing simplifications or deprecations that meaningfully reduce complexity and mean time to recovery.

What We're Looking For

You bring 10+ years building and operating backend systems with at least 5+ years in Go, including 2–3+ years acting as a Staff or Principal-level individual contributor or technical lead for mission-critical systems.

Deep proficiency with protobuf and ConnectRPC or gRPC is essential, along with API lifecycle management expertise covering versioning, compatibility, contract testing, and schema validation tooling.

Strong distributed systems fundamentals are required: idempotency, exactly-once-ish delivery via deduplication and outbox patterns, ordering guarantees, consensus basics, backpressure handling, and concurrency control.

Experience with event-driven architectures on Google Cloud Platform using Pub/Sub, Redis for fast paths, strong schema design in MongoDB or Firestore, and analytics and reporting patterns on ClickHouse or similar columnar databases.

Kubernetes and GKE operations at scale including autoscaling with HPA and VPA, pod disruption budgets, resource limits and requests, multi-region topologies, CI/CD pipelines, and canary or blue-green deployment strategies.

Reliability engineering expertise covers SLIs, SLOs, error budgets, capacity and load testing, incident management, and disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Security and compliance knowledge includes secrets and key management best practices, PCI basics such as scope reduction and key rotation, plus data governance for retention and archival.

Testing discipline across unit, integration, contract, property-based, and performance testing; test data management; and deterministic test environments.

Frontend collaboration skills with solid understanding of Vue.js and TanStack Query to shape clean API surfaces and performance budgets across system boundaries.

Exceptional technical writing and communication abilities for design documents, architectural decision records, RFCs, postmortems, and stakeholder updates.

Nice to have: Hands-on integrations with major payment service providers or local payment rails such as UPI, digital wallets, buy-now-pay-later, cards with 3DS2, and reconciliation at scale. Experience with active-active or multi-region designs and chaos engineering. Observability leadership with OpenTelemetry at organizational scale including tail-based sampling and exemplars. FinOps experience with cost baselining, quotas, budget alarms, and workload right-sizing. Familiarity with regulatory frameworks including PCI DSS, SOC 2, ISO 27001, and privacy laws relevant to global markets.

How We Work With You

When you apply through Get A Job.ai, our recruiting team will review your background and schedule an initial screening call to discuss your experience, technical depth, and career goals. If there's a strong mutual fit, we'll submit your profile to our client with your permission. Throughout the process, we'll coordinate interviews, provide feedback, and support your candidacy. Please do not contact the client directly—all communication should flow through Get A Job.ai to ensure a smooth and professional experience for everyone involved.

Pay

Compensation details will be discussed during the screening process based on your experience and the client's budget for this role.

Equal Employment Opportunity: Get A Job.ai is committed to equal employment opportunity. We evaluate qualified applicants without regard to race, color, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, disability, veteran status, or any other protected characteristic. We welcome candidates from all backgrounds to apply.