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EatClub is Australia's #1 Food & Drink app and a 200+ person scaleup helping over 4 million customers discover restaurants and access real-time deals saving up to 50% off the bill. The platform empowers 8,000+ venues to fill tables and maximize revenue. Originally co-founded by Marco Pierre White, EatClub was awarded Australia's Fastest Growing Tech Company by the AFR in 2025.
As Staff Engineer, Payments, you are a hands-on technical leader (not a people manager) who brings deep payments expertise to the squad responsible for moving money through EatClub across Australia, the UK, and New Zealand. You work closely with the squad's tech lead to shape the technical direction of the payments platform, lead the design of its most complex pieces, and stay actively coding. You are the engineer who represents EatClub in technical conversations with payment partners, banks, and card schemes, and a trusted voice when the business needs to understand payments trade-offs.
On any given week, you will partner with the product manager and tech lead on payments platform direction and roadmap; lead the design of hard payment problems and explain trade-offs in plain language; represent the squad in technical conversations with payment partners, acquirers, and card schemes; introduce external perspective on industry best practices; strengthen reliability, risk, and compliance posture at the platform level; write production code on consequential changes and review others' work; and contribute payments expertise to the CPTO and tech lead on future capability.
Sample initiatives include establishing a single source of truth for how payments work; leading design of improvements to core payment flows that lift approval rates and reliability; strengthening ledger and settlement foundations for end-to-end correctness; shaping a payments architecture that treats Australia, UK, and New Zealand as first-class markets; designing reusable integration patterns for bank and loyalty partners; and contributing to the technical path for the next stage of card and payments strategy.
This is a hands-on technical leadership role, not a people-management role and not a slide-deck architecture role. You influence through expertise, not title. You are a builder with scars who has seen payments break at scale and knows what "correct" actually costs. You are rigorous about money—a cent out of place bothers you. You are a good partner to the tech lead, making their job easier. You are comfortable at the boundary, holding technical conversations with banks, schemes, and auditors. You are a force multiplier who measures yourself by how much better the squad gets. You are commercially literate, understanding that approval rates and settlement timing are revenue.
REQUIREMENTS:
- At least 8 years of software engineering experience, including 4+ years building production payment systems at a fintech, payments company, acquirer, issuer, scheme, or bank
- Track record of leading the design of significant payments work and carrying it through to production
- Deep, practical understanding of card payments and the behaviour of schemes, acquirers, and payment providers in the real world
- Experience designing ledgers, settlement, and reconciliation systems where correctness is measured in cents
- Strong backend engineering in a modern language on cloud infrastructure, with judgement to know when a design is good enough to ship
- Working knowledge of PCI DSS and designing systems that minimize compliance scope
- Experience leading incident response for payment systems and reducing incident load through structural change
- Record of making engineers around you better through design reviews and mentoring
- Credibility with executives and external partners: ability to explain a payments trade-off to a CEO, bank, and scheme and be understood by all three
- Fluency with AI development tools and judgement about where they help and where they mislead
- Great familiarity with idempotency and duplicate handling
NICE-TO-HAVE:
- Card issuing or issuer-processor experience
- Scar tissue from a high-growth fintech, neobank, BNPL, or payments company that scaled under real volume and regulatory scrutiny
- Familiarity with the Australian payments landscape, and with UK, New Zealand, and US schemes
- Experience with serverless AWS stack and event-driven systems
- Exposure to fraud and risk platforms, or to QSAs and ISO 27001 programmes
- Experience in a two-sided marketplace or hospitality tech
- Experience migrating a live financial system without breaking anything
- Safely changing legacy code on a money path in a complex codebase
- Architecting transaction authorisation under strict time limits
