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Checkout.com is a global fintech platform powering over 10 billion transactions yearly for more than one billion shoppers. The company operates behind the scenes for major brands like eBay, Spotify, Klarna, Uber, and Sony, enabling seamless digital payment experiences at scale.
As a Staff Engineer, you will set the technical direction for systems that process payments at very high throughput, where correctness is critical on every transaction. This role is for engineers energized by scale and the hard trade-offs inherent in critical infrastructure: latency budgets, failure domains, consistency guarantees, and 24/7 operational reality.
You will operate as a force multiplier across multiple teams, shaping architecture, raising the engineering bar, and converting ambiguous business-critical problems into incrementally deliverable designs. The role demands deep technical judgment, strong ownership, and pragmatism in breaking large problems into smaller iterations that deliver continuous value.
Key responsibilities include:
- Owning the architecture of high-throughput, low-latency distributed systems, defining service boundaries, data models, and integration patterns that enable order-of-magnitude scaling
- Designing for resilience from first principles: redundancy, graceful degradation, backpressure, idempotency, and recovery to prevent partial failures from becoming customer-facing outages
- Setting and defending non-functional requirements: availability targets, latency percentiles, throughput ceilings, data durability, and recovery objectives
- Leading end-to-end technical decisions from problem framing and design review through production rollout, migration, and decommissioning
- Driving operational excellence through improved observability, alerting, capacity planning, load and chaos testing, incident response, and root-cause closure
- Raising the engineering bar across teams via design reviews, code review, pairing, and mentorship of senior engineers
- Partnering with product, platform, and other engineering teams to sequence delivery, remove blockers, and align multi-team programs on a single technical direction
- Making pragmatic build-versus-buy and refactor-versus-rewrite decisions, communicating reasoning and trade-offs clearly to engineers and senior leadership
The company operates a hybrid model with three days per week in the London office to support collaboration and connection. Checkout.com has 20 offices across six continents with London as headquarters.
Requirements:
- Significant experience building and operating distributed backend systems in production, with a track record of technical leadership across multiple teams
- Demonstrable experience designing for high throughput and low latency, with strong intuition for where systems break under load
- Deep understanding of resilience patterns in distributed systems: idempotency, retries and backoff, circuit breaking, queueing and backpressure, consistency and failure modes
- Strong proficiency in either .NET or Java, with ability to write clear, production-ready code that others can maintain
- Experience with event-driven and streaming architectures, and with relational and non-relational data stores at scale
- Hands-on experience with cloud-based application development (AWS & Azure), containers, orchestration, and infrastructure as code
- Experience owning production systems on call, with strong sense of ownership for observability, monitoring, and incident response
- Experience leading complex migrations or re-architectures of live, business-critical systems with no loss of availability or data integrity
- Excellent communication skills, able to influence without authority, write clear design documents, and express technical trade-offs to engineering and non-technical audiences
Nice-to-haves:
- Experience in payments, financial services, or another domain with strict correctness, auditability, or regulatory requirements
- Experience with multi-region or active-active architectures, including data replication and failover strategies
- History of mentoring engineers into senior and staff-level roles
