[Hiring] Staff Engineer @Zip Co Limited

Role Description

Own the architecture and evolution of Zip’s real-time money movement and payments platform, powering millions of transactions.

Lead cross-team technical direction across distributed systems while embedding AI into engineering workflows and product capabilities.

Remote-first role for US-based engineers, with optional collaboration from our NYC office.

We are seeking a highly experienced and technically strong Staff Engineer to lead complex, cross-domain initiatives across our platform. In this role, you will:

• Set technical direction and drive execution on ambiguous, high-impact problems.
• Shape the architecture of systems that are critical to our business.
• Partner with engineering and product leaders and influence strategic decisions.
• Mentor senior engineers while raising the bar for scalability, reliability, and engineering excellence across the organization.
• Define and scale how AI is used across engineering, driving measurable improvements in developer productivity, system quality, and delivery speed.

Interesting problems you’ll get to solve:

• Design systems that ensure safe, reliable money movement at scale across distributed services.
• Define and evolve platform patterns for event-driven architectures and cross-team system design.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production across multiple teams.
• Balance speed and long-term platform health in critical financial systems.
• Define and standardize AI-assisted engineering patterns (e.g., code generation, testing, debugging, incident analysis) that can be adopted across teams.
• Raise the bar for system reliability, performance, and developer experience across the organization.
• Build systems that ensure financial correctness under failure conditions, including retries, duplication, and reconciliation scenarios.
• Drive adoption of AI across teams by coaching engineers, establishing best practices, and ensuring responsible and effective usage.
• Identify and deliver AI-driven efficiencies, reducing development cycle time, improving code quality, and accelerating incident resolution.
• Partner with platform and tooling teams to integrate AI capabilities into the developer ecosystem (CI/CD, observability, IDEs, internal tools).

Qualifications

• 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed backend systems in modern engineering environments.
• Strong experience in payments, fintech, or other correctness-critical systems such as settlement, reconciliation, or transaction processing.
• Proven track record of leveraging AI to improve engineering outcomes, including personal productivity and enabling team-wide adoption at scale.
• Experience leading complex, cross-team initiatives and driving technical direction across multiple systems.
• Deep expertise in system design, including event-driven architectures, microservices, and high-availability systems.
• Hands-on engineering mindset, staying close to implementation and able to dive into code, services, and infrastructure when needed.
• Strong decision-making ability, evaluating tradeoffs and making clear technical calls in ambiguous situations.
• Experience mentoring senior engineers and raising engineering standards across teams.
• Experience working with cloud platforms such as Azure or AWS, and backend technologies like C#/.NET or similar.
• Experience evaluating and selecting AI tools, models, and workflows with an understanding of tradeoffs (cost, latency, accuracy, safety).
• Ability to define metrics and measure the impact of AI adoption (e.g., developer velocity, code quality, cycle time, incident reduction).

Requirements

• Experience building and scaling systems in fintech or other highly regulated environments, such as payments, lending, banking, settlement, reconciliation, fraud, risk, or transaction processing.
• Experience working in AI-forward, high-scale engineering environments where teams are building at the edge of modern cloud, distributed systems, developer productivity, or applied AI.
• Hands-on experience building production-grade AI capabilities beyond prompt engineering, such as AI agents, agent orchestration frameworks, retrieval-augmented generation, model evaluation pipelines, workflow automation, or AI-powered internal platforms.
• Experience architecting agentic AI systems that safely interact with internal tools, APIs, business workflows, and human-in-the-loop approval processes.
• Experience defining responsible AI governance patterns, including data access controls, model/tool selection standards, evaluation frameworks, observability, cost management, auditability, and risk controls.
• Experience partnering with business, product, risk, compliance, security, legal, or operations leaders to translate ambiguous strategic problems into scalable technical solutions.
• Experience building AI-enabled engineering platforms that improve developer velocity, code quality, testing, debugging, incident response, observability, or release confidence.
• Familiarity with modern AI/ML infrastructure, including model serving, fine-tuning, embeddings, vector search, distributed training, inference optimization, model evaluation, or experimentation platforms.
• Experience with cloud-based AI/ML services and frameworks such as AWS Bedrock, SageMaker, Azure AI, OpenAI, Anthropic, Databricks, LangChain, LlamaIndex, or similar technologies.
• Demonstrated ability to operate as a hands-on technical leader who can set strategy across teams, prototype emerging technologies, and raise the bar for engineering excellence.

Benefits

• Flexible working culture
• Incentive programs
• Unlimited PTO
• Generous paid parental leave
• Leading family support policies
• Company-sponsored 401k match
• Learning and wellness subscription stipend
• Beautiful Union Square office with a casual dress code
• Industry-leading, employer-sponsored insurance for you and your dependents, with several 100% Zip-covered choices available