The Staff Engineer is responsible for leading our technical foundation for our Lending Systems teams (customer onboarding platforms, risk and offer engines, and partner-facing APIs) to drive innovation, while collaborating with other teams. The candidate must take on a mentoring role, design scalable systems, and influence cross-functional initiatives in a hands-on position where they will make key technical decisions and build critical services.
Our Lending Systems team at PayJoy serves 9+ international markets, each with a tailored customer experience. You'll build flexible, maintainable systems that scale with our products and adapt to evolving market demands. You'll balance system complexity, design abstractions, and service encapsulation.
This is an Individual Contributor role focused on designing and executing improvements to our technical foundation.
Responsibilities
- Solve Critical Product & Platform Problems Identify and prioritize issues across UI layers, service boundaries, and data
flows. Deliver solutions that improve performance, reliability, and developer experience. - Architect & Build Scalable Application Components
- Design and implement robust APIs, backend services, and data models. Introduce modern frameworks and patterns that other engineers can adopt across the organization.
- Lead Cross-Functional Engineering Initiatives. Partner with product, design, and engineering teams to define systemwide
solutions. Ensure UI, API, and database layers work cohesively and meet business and technical standards. - Mentor & Develop Engineering talent guide engineers through code reviews, pair programming, and architectural discussions. foster a culture of learning, quality, and thoughtful technical decision-making.
- Continuously Improve the Platform and evaluate existing systems, identify gaps, and drive modernization efforts
across frontend frameworks, service architecture, and data infrastructure requirements
Requirements
- Education & Experience
Bachelor’s degree in computer science, software engineering, or related field. - 12+ years of experience building and scaling production systems in high-growth environments.
- UI, API, and Backend Expertise
- Strong proficiency in designing and implementing RESTful or event-driven APIs.
- Experience building user interfaces or frontend components that integrate with complex backend systems.
- Deep understanding of backend development in languages such as Java, Python, PHP, or similar.
- Database & Data Modeling Skills, hands-on experience with relational and NoSQL databases, schema design, query optimization, and data integrity patterns.
- Distributed Systems & Architecture solid understanding of system design, scalability, and distributed systems fundamentals.
- Experience with cloud platforms such as AWS, GCP, or Azure.
- Strong communication skills with the ability to explain technical concepts to non-technical stakeholders.
- Demonstrated ability to lead through influence, collaborate across teams, and mentor engineers at all levels.
- Bonus Experience
Exposure to mobile technologies, mobile payments, or fintech systems involving fraud, identity, or high-volume transaction processing. Experience building or maintaining large-scale systems used by millions of users.
Benefits
- 100% Company-funded health insurance for employee and immediate family
- Company-funded employee life and disability insurance
- 20 Paid vacation days, Flexible sick leave
- $2,000 USD annual Co-working Travel perk
- $2,000 USD annual Professional Development perk
- Headphone benefit, home office equipment allowance and wellness perks
- $340 Company-funded Commuter benefit
- Catered lunches
What We Do
PayJoy's mission is to deliver access to credit to the next billion people in emerging markets worldwide. Our unique mobile security technology gives customers the ability to afford their first smartphone on credit, using the phone itself as collateral, and then provides further access to credit to help weather life's unexpected financial surprises and climb the ladder of economic well-being. Founded in 2015, today PayJoy has reached millions of customers in a dozen countries around the globe, including Mexico, Brazil, Colombia, India, Kenya, and South Africa, and is on a strong growth path with support from major industry partners to bring credit to the next billion emerging consumers.
