Staff Engineer - Fraud Prevention

About the role

This position involves leading technical strategy and architecture for our Consumer Fraud and Business Fraud engineering teams. You will optimize critical infrastructure and mentor engineers while overseeing a platform that processes vast amounts of real-time data. The role requires aligning platform strategy with business goals across multiple specialized squads. You will be responsible for designing the foundational systems that power fraud detection at scale. Success in this position means ensuring ultra-reliable and low-latency execution for mission-critical financial workflows. You will directly influence engineering culture and set high technical standards from start to finish. This is a strategic opportunity to own the entire stack for fraud prevention infrastructure.

Key facts

What you'll do

• Provide overall technical leadership for multiple engineering teams, aligning platform strategy with business goals.
• Design and optimize backend services for extremely low latency and a high-throughput rules engine.
• Create optimal data access patterns, partitioning strategies, and caching layers within our multi-cloud database environment.
• Develop robust pipelines for large-scale parallel execution of real-time feature computations and aggregations.
• Influence engineering culture, mentor senior engineers, and ensure high technical standards from start to finish.
• Evaluate and select technologies for the data platform, ensuring they meet strict latency and scalability requirements.
• Collaborate closely with product and data science teams to translate fraud detection requirements into technical specifications.
• Troubleshoot complex performance issues and scalability bottlenecks in production distributed systems.
• Define and enforce best practices for code quality, testing, and deployment automation across the platform.
• Act as the primary technical authority for fraud infrastructure decisions impacting the entire engineering organization.
• Partner with security and compliance teams to ensure all platform designs adhere to regulatory standards.
• Drive the adoption of platform thinking to improve developer velocity and system resilience.

Requirements

• 7+ years of software engineering experience, including time at a Staff, Principal, or Lead Architect level.
• Extensive knowledge in building highly available, distributed systems requiring ultra-low latency.
• Practical experience with stream processing frameworks in production settings.
• Advanced skill in polyglot persistence, including tuning data models across Document, Wide-Column, and Relational databases.
• A strong focus on platform engineering principles like reliability, observability, and developer efficiency.
• Ability to clearly explain complex architectural ideas and build consensus across different teams.
• Experience managing technical debt and refactoring large-scale systems without disrupting service.
• Deep understanding of distributed systems trade-offs, including consistency, availability, and partition tolerance.

Skills & tools

• Kafka
• Flink
• SQS
• PubSub

Practical notes

This role offers generous cash and equity compensation, with early exercise for all options. We support a remote-first culture, flexible paid time off, and a year-end break. Benefits include health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and dependents in the US and Canada, plus 4% matching for 401k/RRSP. You'll receive a MacBook Pro, a one-time home office stipend, and monthly stipends for meals, social meet-ups, health and wellness, and learning.

This role is based in the United States and requires eligibility to work in the country. Remote work is supported from across the US or Canada, though the position may require travel to our offices in San Francisco or Berkeley, California, for in-person collaboration and strategic planning sessions. These meetings are essential for aligning with cross-functional partners and reinforcing our collaborative engineering culture. The schedule is full-time, with expectations for synchronous participation during core business hours. Candidates must be prepared to integrate into an existing high-performance team that values asynchronous communication and deep technical contribution. The compensation package is highly competitive and reflects the scope of responsibility and impact associated with this position. Equity participation is included and is an important component of the total rewards package. Early exercise options are available to all employees, providing significant long-term value. The company invests in the well-being and development of its staff through comprehensive benefits and professional growth opportunities. This includes health, dental, and vision coverage for employees and their dependents in the United States and Canada. We also provide a 4% company match for retirement savings plans such as 401k or RRSP. To support remote work, each team member receives a MacBook Pro, a one-time stipend for setting up a home office, and monthly allowances for meals, social activities, health and wellness, and continuous learning. These benefits are designed to support a sustainable and productive work-life balance.