Software Engineer III, Payments & Risk

Position Overview:

FastSpring - a rapidly growing Digital Goods and Gaming reseller (“Merchant of Record”) is looking for a Software Engineer III, Payments & Risk. Your role will involve extracting meaningful signals from a diverse set of data; design, build and iteratively improve our “risk engine” and continuously experiment to make our KRIs (Key Risk Indicators) better for our customers in every geography with every Payment Method. As we rapidly scale, you will also own the evolution of our risk engine from a set of static rules to a supervised model that minimizes fraud to an industry leading AI/ML driven true “engine” that will remain our competitive advantage in gaming and digital goods markets all over the world. 

Primary Responsibilities & Goals:

• View our Payments domain as a “cube” of Customers, Payment Methods and Geography and design an empirical system to best optimize for our sellers’ revenue in every cell, while not impacting any other. E.g., you will proactively observe, monitor, and learn signals from the “cell” for Credit Card Payments in Brazil for seller “X” and build data-driven, bottom-up risk solutions to minimize fraud and chargeback there.
• Build a customer-facing (both buyer and seller) minimally intrusive solution that uses industry best practices (3DS, KYC, MFA, Threat Score, External Services, Internal Model based on recent and past behavior etc) set of services and solution to minimize fraud (chargeback, dispute, alert) that increase our customers’ revenue and have a positive impact on NPS (Net Promoter Score).
• Understand and discover the nuances between Payment Methods and customer purchase behavior in different geographies (in global and local currencies) and encode the enduring behavior in a set of actionable rules.
• Security, Resilience and Scale are three pillars of our Engineering Excellence - built on the foundation of Observability. You will proudly own end-to-end actionable observability in Payments and Risk domain, and proactively add and/or tweak it as we execute our Product Strategy (“Ship One New Payment Method a month”)
• Cross-functional Influence - this role, especially, requires a degree of “healthy paranoia” to succeed. Your success will be fueled by that, but could only be achieved with a high degree of internal collaboration and influence to balance your “sense of urgency”.
• You must deeply believe and live with the technical philosophy of “unreasonable effectiveness of data”. Data must trump opinion, or even past experience, in an overwhelming majority if not all of your decisions.

Experience & Qualifications:

• 3-5 years of experience as a Lead Engineer, or key technical contributor in a fast-growing Fintech, preferably with international payments.
• Deep expertise in back-end programming. We write code in Java.
• Passionate about Resilience and Observability. You can succeed wildly if you embrace “know before your customer knows” in our domain and be transparent, timely and truthful about your learning both internally and with customers.
• Understanding Payments and Risk as a complete domain  - if you can clearly articulate how card processing works, or the pros- and cons- of 3DS in, say, Latin America, or the emerging ubiquity of “Real-time Payments” - often backed by central banks - in certain countries - you will grow as fast as the company does, if not faster!
• Independent Deductive Ability from data - you know the philosophy, principle and practices of data and apply it daily at work. E.g., Type I vs Type II errors, Correlation Coefficient, when to use heat map vs. stacked bar chart etc.
• Ability to treat most external technology as “black box services with iron clad contract” but fully expect them to degrade or even be unavailable for extended periods of time. In the end, our customers don’t care about the depth of the tech stack but only if it works for them all the time. We aim for 99.99%+ uptime for our Payment Services - every month.