SDE V (Staff)

About

As an SDE V (Staff) at the global commerce platform, your role is crucial in setting the architecture, enhancing reliability, and increasing team effectiveness. You will be responsible for overseeing core payments models, subscriptions, payments, reconciliation, tax, and related services to ensure correctness, auditability, and high performance at scale. This individual contributor role carries organizational-level influence and is focused on designing systems, establishing standards, and nurturing engineers. The role operates with a pragmatic architecture approach, high ownership, and a product‑first mindset, emphasizing IC leadership and continuous improvement through design, collaboration, and data‑driven decisions.

Responsibilities

• Architect and deploy multi‑tenant, planet‑scale services with clear domain boundaries and strict SLOs.
• Own API and schema design, including protobuf/ConnectRPC conventions, versioning policy, deprecation playbooks, and ensuring long‑lasting contracts.
• Ensure resilience and availability of core payment paths through various strategies like timeouts, retries, circuit breakers, and idempotency keys.
• Guarantee complete auditability by implementing append‑only double entry ledger, immutable event streams, trace‑linked entities, and reconciliations.
• Establish error boundaries end‑to‑end by designing uniform error contracts, implementing compensations/backfills, and automated replay.
• Maintain a comprehensive service catalog, scorecards, and configuration stewardship across various platforms.
• Focus on observability as a product with OpenTelemetry, metrics, trace sampling, SLO dashboards, and efficient alerting systems.
• Drive production excellence with deployment strategies, incident management, and security‑by‑design practices.
• Lead core domain evolution, reliability strategy, API & data governance, and practice leadership to enhance technical standards across teams.
• Play a key role in hiring, team growth, cross‑functional partnerships, risk management, and roadmap planning.

Qualifications

• At least 10 years of experience in building and operating backend systems, with a minimum of 5 years in Go language.
• Proficiency in protobuf, ConnectRPC/gRPC, and API lifecycle management.
• Strong knowledge of distributed systems fundamentals, event‑driven architectures, Kubernetes operations, reliability engineering, and security best practices.
• Experience in testing disciplines, frontend collaboration, technical writing, and c