Staff Software Engineer (Backend) - Payments
Collectors Universe, Inc.17 hours ago
Santa Ana, CA, USAStaff+
Responsibilities
- Own the end-to-end architecture of the Payments domain, including C#/.NET services, distributed systems, data stores, gateway integrations, and frontends.
- Define payment gateway abstractions and lead gateway migrations, payment-method expansion, re-platforming, settlement, refunds, reconciliation, and failover strategies.
- Set standards for PCI-DSS practices, tokenization, idempotency, retries, webhook reliability, audit controls, testing, security, and observability.
- Lead moderate-to-significant multi-quarter projects, coordinating engineers, stakeholders, dependencies, priorities, and delivery risks.
- Partner with Payments, Marketplace, Grading, Vault, Finance, Security, platform, CRM, identity, and data/ETL teams.
- Mentor senior and mid-level engineers through design reviews, pairing, feedback, documentation, and knowledge sharing.
- Establish standards and guardrails for AI coding tools, including verification, testing, security, intellectual-property hygiene, and code-review practices.
Requirements
- 8+ years of engineering experience, including technical leadership of multi-engineer, multi-quarter projects.
- Expert-level backend engineering experience with C# and .NET, including complex APIs, asynchronous patterns, and distributed data consistency.
- Production experience across React, Svelte, TypeScript, APIs, service layers, data stores, and infrastructure.
- Deep payments or fintech experience with gateway integrations, idempotency, webhook reliability, tokenization, reconciliation, and PCI compliance.
- Deep relational and NoSQL database expertise, including PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, schema design, migrations, and query performance.
- Strong distributed-systems experience with service boundaries, API and contract design, Kafka-based event-driven architectures, messaging, idempotency, and failure handling.
- Production AWS and Kubernetes experience with infrastructure-as-code using CDK and/or Terraform.
- Experience improving testing strategy, observability, documentation, incident response, dashboards, alerting, and distributed tracing using Datadog or similar tools.
- Experience using AI coding assistants and agentic tools such as Claude Code, Copilot, or Cursor in team workflows.
- Familiarity with Agile/Scrum methodologies and strong written, verbal, analytical, troubleshooting, and cross-functional communication skills.
- Passion for collecting is a plus.
Benefits
- Candidates within a one-hour commuting distance of the office may be expected to work onsite most of the time; additional details are discussed during recruiting.
- The company supports accommodation requests during the interview process and is committed to equal employment opportunity.
Tech Stack
Categories
About Collectors Universe, Inc.
Collectors Universe (Collectors) provides authentication, grading, vaulting, and marketplace services for collectibles such as trading cards, coins, video games, tickets, autographs, comics, and memorabilia. Founded in 1986 and headquartered in Santa Ana, California, the privately held company operates PSA and PCGS, plus PSA Vault and the Card Ladder analytics platform, and integrates with marketplaces like eBay. It earns fees for grading, storage, consignment, and data services, and has certified millions of items.