Staff Engineer

The posting, as Zip Co Limited wrote it

• Own the architecture and evolution of Zip’s real-time money movement and payments platform, powering millions of transactions.
• Lead cross-team technical direction across distributed systems while embedding AI into engineering workflows and product capabilities.
• Remote-first role for US-based engineers, with optional collaboration from our NYC office.

Start your adventure with Zip

At Zip, engineers own systems that move real money. Join Zip’s Engineering function and put your name to solving fascinating challenges at scale in an agile, test-driven development environment. If you value good domain-driven design and enjoy delivering quality work at pace, you’ll be a great fit with the squads responsible for building cloud-native software applications that serve millions of customers and process billions of dollars in payments.

We are seeking a highly experienced and technically strong Staff Engineer to lead complex, cross-domain initiatives across our platform. In this role, you will set technical direction, drive execution on ambiguous, high-impact problems, and shape the architecture of systems that are critical to our business. This is a hands-on leadership role where you will partner with engineering and product leaders, influence strategic decisions, and mentor senior engineers while raising the bar for scalability, reliability, and engineering excellence across the organization.

You will also play a key role in defining and scaling how AI is used across engineering, driving measurable improvements in developer productivity, system quality, and delivery speed.

Interesting problems you’ll get to solve

• Design systems that ensure safe, reliable money movement at scale across distributed services.
• Define and evolve platform patterns for event-driven architectures and cross-team system design.
• Lead ambiguous, high-impact initiatives from concept to production across multiple teams.
• Balance speed and long-term platform health in critical financial systems.
• Define and standardize AI-assisted engineering patterns (e.g., code generation, testing, debugging, incident analysis) that can be adopted across teams.
• Raise the bar for system reliability, performance, and developer experience across the organization.
• Build systems that ensure financial correctness under failure conditions, including retries, duplication, and reconciliation scenarios.
• Drive adoption of AI across teams by coaching engineers, establishing best practices, and ensuring responsible and effective usage.
• Identify and deliver AI-driven efficiencies, reducing development cycle time, improving code quality, and accelerating incident resolution.
• Partner with platform and tooling teams to integrate AI capabilities into the developer ecosystem (CI/CD, observability, IDEs, internal tools).

What you’ll bring to the team

• 12+ years of experience building and operating distributed backend systems in modern engineering environments.
• Strong expe

[…]
benefits.

*Please note that visa sponsorship is not available for this position.

If hired, employees will be in an 'at-will position' and the Company reserves the right to modify base salary (as well as any other discretionary payment or compensation or benefit program) at any time, including for reasons related to individual performance, Company or individual department/team performance, and market factors.

Be a part of a team that reflects the diversity of our customers

We pride ourselves on being a workplace that provides equal opportunities to people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, veteran status, and everything else that makes you unique.

Equally, we’re committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are accessible and inclusive. Please let us know If there are any adjustments that need to be made to ensure you have a fair and equitable experience.

And finally…get to know us

Zip Co Limited (ASX: ZIP) is a digital financial services company, offering innovative, people-centered products.

Operating in two core markets - Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and the US, Zip offers access to point-of-sale credit and digital payment services, connecting millions of customers with its global network of tens of thousands of merchants. We’re proud to be a values-led business and our values - Customer First, Own it, Stronger Together and Change the Game - guide us in everything we do.

I acknowledge by clicking "Submit Application", that the information provided is true and correct. I also understand that any willful dishonesty may render for refusal of this application or immediate termination of employment. By providing your information, you acknowledge that you have read our Zip Applicant and Candidate Privacy Notice and authorize Zip to process your data subject to those terms. Zip participates in the federal government’s E-Verify program. #LI-Remote

Before you apply, give Zip a try -> rebrand.ly/check-zip-out