Senior Staff Engineer

Role summary

PAYO Digital Bank, N.A. (PDB), Payoneer's national trust bank subsidiary, is seeking a deeply experienced Senior Staff Engineer to serve as the technical anchor of the bank's engineering organization and the architect of record for its core transactional systems. You will own the design of the integration between the core banking ledger and the stablecoin issuance engine: the system of record that reconciles fiat reserves, on-chain token supply, and customer balances with bank-grade accuracy and auditability.

This is a high-impact, hands-on architecture and leadership role reporting directly to the Chief Technology Officer of PDB, providing technical direction to the core team of engineers.

The ideal candidate is a distributed systems expert with high-integrity transactional experience (banking core, payments ledger, exchange, or settlement infrastructure). You must be able to defend architectural decisions to independent auditors and OCC examiners, and build engineering culture as deliberately as you build systems.

What you'll do

• Core Architecture Ownership: Architect and build the bank's core backend, including microservices, transactional persistence schemas, event messaging endpoints, and internal APIs, documented to a standard suitable for OCC examination.
• Ledger & Stablecoin Integration: Design the reconciliation architecture guaranteeing absolute consistency between the fiat subledger, reserve accounts, and on-chain token supply. Build the event messaging layer securely synchronizing core ledger transactions with custody platform mint/burn actions.
• Technical Leadership: Serve as the technical lead and mentor for the Core Backend team. Establish uncompromising standards for code reviews, testing, observability, and deployment appropriate for a regulated bank.
• Compliance in the Transaction Path: Integrate automated sanctions screening connectors with auditable screening and case escalation hooks.
• Resilience & Observability: Partner with the SRE Lead on multi-region availability, failover targets, and real-time ledger alerting. Work with the Security division on IAM, key management interfaces, and threat modeling for mint/burn pipelines.
• Audit Readiness: Support UAT, feature freezes, and external control validation ahead of the pre-opening exam.

Who you are

• Engineering Depth: 12+ years of software engineering experience, including 5+ years hands-on architecting high-integrity transactional systems (banking core, payments ledger, exchange, or settlement infrastructure).
• Distributed Systems Expertise: Deep understanding of event-driven architecture, exactly-once processing semantics, idempotency, and reconciliation at scale.
• Cloud-Native Infrastructure: Hands-on experience with Kubernetes, Infrastructure-as-Code, and multi-region deployment in a regulated or audited environment.
• Audit-Grade Engineering: Track record designing immutable transaction logs, reconciliation controls, and automated evidence generation for examiners and external auditors.
• Technical Mentorship: Proven success elevating the technical output of senior engineers, setting architectural standards, and owning delivery end-to-end.
• Regulator-Ready Documentation: Ability to produce system architecture documentation that withstands intense regulatory and audit scrutiny.

Not a must but a great advantage:

• Digital Asset Systems: Direct experience with stablecoin, digital asset custody, or blockchain settlement systems, including on-chain/off-chain reconciliation.
• Examination Environments: Familiarity with FFIEC IT examination expectations or SOC 2 audit environments.