Job Title: Software Engineer, Payments (Backend / Platform)
Look for candidates from Payments, Finance, Retail, or manufacturing domain.
Location: Fremont, CA
Client: Tesla
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Position Summary
Our direct client is seeking a highly skilled Software Engineer, Payments to join their Payments Engineering team. This role is responsible for designing, building, and scaling backend platforms that power global financial operations. The engineer will collaborate closely with engineering, finance, and product teams to deliver highly reliable, secure, and scalable payment systems that support rapid innovation and global expansion.
The ideal candidate brings strong distributed systems fundamentals, an ownership mindset, and experience operating production systems where correctness, reliability, and observability are critical.
Key Responsibilities
- Design, develop, and scale core payment infrastructure and reconciliation systems.
- Partner with internal and external stakeholders to understand business and technical challenges, propose solutions, and deliver production-ready systems.
- Architect and build a reconciliation platform from the ground up, leveraging an AI-first approach.
- Own the end-to-end lifecycle of offline payment processing, ensuring correctness, auditability, and fault tolerance.
- Identify and integrate AI agents and automation to improve operational efficiency.
- Design and implement workflow orchestration engines that support reliability, failure handling, and human-in-the-loop workflows.
- Improve platform reliability, observability, and incident response through metrics, logging, tracing, and post-incident learnings.
- Apply best practices in software engineering, including version control, automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and containerized deployments.
Minimum Qualifications
- Bachelor s degree in computer science, Engineering, or a related field, or equivalent practical experience.
- 5+ years of professional experience designing, building, and operating production backend systems at scale.
- Strong backend development experience in Java, Kotlin, Go, Python, C#, or similar languages.
- Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems, including microservices, APIs, and asynchronous processing using queues or streams.
- Strong reliability engineering fundamentals, including idempotency, retries/backoff, failure-mode analysis, and consistency trade-offs.
- Solid SQL and data modeling skills, with attention to data integrity, auditability, and reporting needs.
- Hands-on experience with containers, CI/CD, and container orchestration platforms (e.g., Kubernetes).
- Demonstrated experience building and using observability tools (metrics, logs, distributed tracing) to operate and improve systems.
Preferred Qualifications
- Experience with payments or financial systems, including payment processing, payouts, reconciliation, or disputes.
- Experience with workflow orchestration platforms such as Temporal, Airflow, Argo, or similar tools.
- Experience integrating AI-enabled components into production systems, including evaluation, guardrails, cost/latency considerations, and rollback strategies.
Working Style and Behavioral Expectations
Notes
Interview Process
- 2 3 interview rounds same day for 45 mins each
- Onsite interviews required at 901 Page Avenue, Fremont, CA, candidates will be informed 24-48 hrs. Before about the date.
- Candidates unable or unwilling to attend onsite interviews should be rejected
Target Candidate Profiles
- Local candidates in Fremont or surrounding areas who can commute daily to the Tesla location.
- Backend or platform engineers from high-scale consumer, marketplace, or fintech environments.
- Engineers with real production ownership and on-call responsibility.
- Candidates with experience integrating external vendors or APIs and handling failures gracefully.
- Payments specialists preferred; however, strong distributed systems engineers who can ramp up on payments quickly are also suitable.
Common Disqualifiers / Red Flags
- Primarily front-end experience or limited to basic CRUD applications without production operations ownership.
- Lack of experience designing for reliability (e.g., idempotency, retries, state machines, concurrency).
- Inability to clearly articulate impact, trade-offs, or past technical decisions.
- Discomfort with ambiguity or cross-functional collaboration.
Screening Questions
(Please include candidate answers with the submission)
- Describe a system you built that processes money or other high-correctness data. What were the failure modes, and how did you handle them?
- What is your approach to reconciliation between internal records and an external processor or bank settlement file?
- Describe an incident you were involved in, including the root cause, mitigation steps, and changes made to prevent recurrence.
- Which programming languages and technology stacks have you used most recently, and what is the most complex backend service you have owned end-to-end?
Candidate Submission Instructions
Please submit the following information for each candidate:
- Resume and LinkedIn profile
- Current location and work authorization status
- Compensation expectations
- Earliest start date / notice period
- Brief write-up mapping experience to:
- Distributed systems
- Payments or financial workflows (if applicable)
- Production operations and on-call responsibility
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