Sr. Software Engineer (payments)
VGS· startup· Financial Services· Oct 18, 2025 · 13mo agoPosted 374 days ago
San Francisco Bay Area
Hybrid
Full-time
Senior
$140K–$230K
5+ years exp
Before you apply
Ghost Signal:
Open since October 18, 2025 — 374 days, and still accepting applications.
Job description
About VGS
VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.
That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.
Come build the platform that enables modern payments for the world's largest companies. We're helping businesses unlock new possibilities in an industry that never stops moving. And that takes exceptional people.
Trusted Engineering That Matters
Engineering at VGS
VGS is building the platform powering agentic commerce and global payments infrastructure. VGS Engineering is the pillar that supports that vision. We create a platform that is an indispensable, ubiquitous component of our partners' payments and security infrastructure. We build and operate high-scale, reliable, and resilient systems that manage mission-critical payment data across the globe. We don't just participate in the payments ecosystem; we power it.
Our Environment & Culture
Modern Tooling as Leverage: We value speed and impact. To ensure nothing slows you down, we arm you with a highly consistent modern stack (e.g. AWS, Kubernetes, Java, TypeScript, Python) and world-class AI-augmented SDLC tooling. We strip away the friction so you can focus on the problems that demand creativity and judgment.
Ownership of Outcomes: Scaling global payments infrastructure requires individuals who take personal ownership of outcomes from day one. We look for builders who combine high agency with deep strategic alignment; channeling their urgency and relentless iteration into what matters most.
Mission-Critical Accountability: We power payments infrastructure for global market leaders, making system trust and integrity our core deliverable. We don't treat compliance (PCI, SOC2, ISO27001), security patching, and platform maintenance as administrative overhead—we engineer them with first-class product discipline. In payments infrastructure, reliability is not background work, it’s part of what customers buy.
Learn More: See how our engineering practices drive trust and innovation in our official blog and our reliability practices .
About the Role
As a Senior Software Engineer, you will be a key contributor and technical practitioner on our Payments Acceptance team. In this role, you will help design, scale, and fortify global, high-throughput payment systems designed to execute mission-critical transactions with zero downtime. You will take direct ownership of expanding our high-impact Value-Added Services (VAS) including Network Tokens, Account Updater, 3DS, and Account Validation.
Working hand-in-hand with Tech Leads, Product Management, and adjacent platform teams, you will execute complex initiatives and uphold enterprise reliability standards. Rather than executing against rigid task lists or waiting for top-down instructions, you will bring high agency to your daily work, pioneering AI-native engineering methodologies and integrating agentic workflows across the entire SDLC. We are looking for hands-on product-minded builders who refuse to settle for the status quo, hate manual friction, and take immense pride in solving complex distributed systems challenges at 10,000+ TPS with exceptional quality, scalability, reliability, and security.
What You'll Do
Build Mission-Critical Payments Services: Design, build, and optimize high-availability, low-latency, and resilient Java microservices powering our core Payments Acceptance platform and Value-Added Services.
Drive AI-Native Engineering: Actively integrate AI-augmented development tools and agentic workflows into your daily SDLC—from rapid prototyping and automated code generation to comprehensive test suite creation and complex refactoring to eliminate friction and multiply delivery velocity.
Drive Resiliency & Automation: Eliminate manual toil by building automated, self-healing services using GitOps, modern CI/CD pipelines, and robust Infrastructure-as-Code practices.
Deep Observability & Operations: Configure and maintain telemetry tooling (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry) to proactively spot bottlenecks. You will participate in on-call rotations and lead blameless post-mortems to continuously harden system reliability.
Enable Engineering Velocity: Partner with cross-functional teams to build and adopt "Golden Paths" that streamline software delivery. Mentor mid-level and junior engineers while championing high code quality and testing standards.
Customer & Product Impact: Own service functionality end-to-end ensuring security, performance, and low latency for external customer traffic while supporting smooth platform adoption internally.
What You Bring
Ownership at Scale: 5+ years of software engineering experience taking personal ownership of features in complex, high-throughput distributed systems within mission-critical environments.
Java & Microservices Expertise: Proficiency in Java and modern frameworks (Spring/Spring Boot), with a strong command of REST API design, distributed architecture, and microservices design patterns.
Data & Messaging Systems: Hands-on experience with event-driven architectures, messaging systems (Kafka, SQS), and relational database tuning and performance optimization.
Cloud-Native & Containers: Solid hands-on experience with containerized delivery paradigms (Docker, Kubernetes/EKS) and public cloud ecosystems, preferably AWS.
Security & Compliance Foundations: Solid understanding of secure coding practices, API security, and operating within regulated compliance frameworks (PCI-DSS, SOC2).
Growth Mindset & High Agency: You're curious; you thrive at acquiring the context and asking questions needed to solve meaningful problems without needing every task spelled out. You have an innate drive to experiment, automate away repetitive tasks, and acquire whatever missing context is needed to solve complex technical challenges end-to-end.
Nice to Have:
Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
BA/BS degree
A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
Direct domain experience in payments (Network Tokens, Account Updater, or 3DS).
Hands-on experience leveraging AI developer tools, or agentic automation in day-to-day engineering workflows.
Proven track record of database performance tuning or query troubleshooting in high-concurrency production environments.
Application prep
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Keywords to mirror
aiawskubernetesjavatypescriptpythonci/cdrestapidocker
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