The Role
As a Senior Software Engineer on the Payments team, you will own the software that moves real money for Order.co's customers — virtual-card issuance and authorization, bank connections, accounting integrations, recurring and consolidated invoicing, and ACH / RTP rails. You'll deliver complex features reliably, own subsystems end-to-end from initial design through rollout and post-release fixes, and mentor junior and mid-level engineers along the way. You'll be a credible technical voice in design discussions, challenge weak assumptions early, and help the team build software that is correct, maintainable, and secure — qualities that matter especially in code paths where a bug shows up on a customer's bank statement. Along the way, you'll grow your architectural judgment in money-movement systems and predictably ship work that moves the business forward.
Responsibilities
Technical Execution & Code Ownership
- Independently design and implement complex, multi-part features from requirements to production
- Own subsystems, services, or critical components in the payments stack — for example, the internal financial ledger, the virtual-cards issuance and authorization lifecycle, bank connections, or the invoicing and auto-debit pipeline. The team routes questions to you for these areas
- Write clean, maintainable, production-ready code with consistent test coverage — money-movement code paths are held to a high test bar
- Navigate existing codebases with architectural discernment — identify sound patterns to build upon, recognize technical debt, and use AI tooling as an accelerant while applying your own judgment on correctness, security, and alignment with the system's direction
- Debug production issues effectively; seek first to understand — investigate evidence and identify root causes rather than applying band-aids, especially in webhook, retry, and reconciliation paths where a quick patch can hide a deeper consistency bug
Design & Architecture Contribution
- Participate actively in design reviews; your designs regularly influence team-level architecture decisions
- Propose sound technical designs that account for scalability, performance, and reliability trade-offs — and for payments-specific concerns like idempotency, exactly-once semantics, reconciliation between internal state and vendor reports, and clean separation between authorization and capture
- Identify risks before they become incidents — surface edge cases, data consistency concerns, and failure modes during planning. In payments, that includes double-charge, double-credit, dropped webhook, and out-of-order event scenarios
End-to-End Delivery & Ownership
- Scope and estimate work accurately; solve problems in order — break down epics into deliverable, independently reviewable units
- Deliver features end-to-end, including rollout coordination and post-release monitoring. Rollouts that affect real money rely on feature-flagging, dark-launching, reconciling, and watching dashboards before declaring "done"
- Communicate risks and blockers early — don't absorb uncertainty silently
- Review stories critically before committing: ensure they're appropriately broken down and that dependencies are well understood by the team
Mentorship & Technical Leadership
- Mentor junior and mid-level engineers through code reviews, pairing, and direct feedback
- Provide high-quality, substantive code reviews — lead with humility, treat the author as a teammate to help, and catch what AI misses; teach others to do the same
- Teach best practices; your presence raises the quality of code around you
Technical Influence
- Influence technical decisions through credibility, not just seniority
- Drive improvements in team practices — testing patterns, observability for money-movement flows, code organization, and the bar for test coverage in code paths that move real funds
- Champion quality and standards; push back on shortcuts that create long-term cost — especially in code that touches funds or credit
Communication & Collaboration
- Explain technical decisions clearly to both technical and non-technical stakeholders
- Represent engineering well in product and cross-functional discussions, including with Finance, Operations, and Credit on reconciliation, credit-risk, and dispute-handling questions
- Translate vendor documentation (Stripe, Lithic, and others) into clear, scoped engineering work
- Approach all assignments with a security lens — actively look for vulnerabilities in your own code and in the code you review, with extra care in PII and PCI-adjacent paths
Qualifications
- You are motivated by accountability — you own outcomes, not just tasks
- You are results-oriented and measure success by shipped, working software
- You are motivated by correctness in code that touches money — the consequences of a bug land on real customer balances, and you take that seriously
- You love helping people on your team grow and improve
- Writing tests is an integral part of your development process, not an afterthought
- You know how to design and build software incrementally — you don't need a complete spec to make progress
- Collaborating with the people around you to achieve a goal motivates you
- You are collaborative, open-minded, and actively developing your craft
- You are curious and pragmatic about AI-driven solutions — you apply them where they add real value and stay skeptical where they don't
- Familiarity with AI-assisted development tools — you understand how they work, where they help, and where they fail. Prior hands-on use is a plus; intellectual curiosity and the instinct to evaluate AI output critically are what matter
Technical Skills
- Strong foundation in computer science fundamentals: data structures, algorithms, and system design
- Expertise in building production-grade applications and services using Ruby and Ruby on Rails
- Extensive experience with PostgreSQL and SQL-based data modeling, including query optimization and performance tuning
- Deep understanding of web application security, observability, and scalable system architecture
- Proven ability to design, build, and maintain secure, scalable, and well-documented APIs
- Experience building integrations with external systems — REST/GraphQL APIs, webhooks, event-driven pipelines, or third-party vendor connections
- Hands-on experience with at least one payment processor or card issuer (Stripe, Lithic, Adyen, Marqeta, Braintree, or equivalents), or comparable fintech vendor work
- Working familiarity with at least one of: double-entry ledger design, idempotency / exactly-once patterns for webhooks and money-movement, ACH / wire / card-network basics, or reconciliation against vendor reports
- Familiarity with AWS and other cloud platforms, including infrastructure as code and CI/CD pipelines
- Experience using AI coding assistants (e.g., Claude, GitHub Copilot) as part of your development workflow — not as a shortcut, but as a force multiplier; you provide them with appropriate context about constraints and conventions, critique AI output, recognize failure modes, and decide when to override
What Great Looks Like
A Senior Software Engineer on the Payments team who is thriving at this level demonstrates:
- Reliable delivery of complex work — consistently ships multi-part features on time with low defect rates
- Low defects in owned areas — proactively monitors and improves the quality of the systems they own; in payments specifically, that means incident-free quarters in code paths that move funds and clean reconciliation against vendor reports
- High trust from team and stakeholders — engineers, Finance, Operations, and Credit partners know they can count on you
- Measurable mentorship impact — engineers around you write better code because of your reviews and guidance
"Someone we can depend on for the work that matters — especially the work that touches money."
Failure Modes We Screen Against
We actively evaluate candidates for the following anti-patterns during the interview process:
Failure Mode
What It Looks Like
Strong coder, weak owner
Ships code but doesn't manage to the task — owns the merge, not the outcome; hands off and moves on without monitoring or fixing post-release issues
Solo expert
Hoards knowledge instead of sharing — becomes a single point of failure and blocks team growth
Overconfident designer
Proposes solutions without considering trade-offs — jumps to conclusions, resists alternative approaches
Rubber-stamper
Produces AI-generated output without verifying it against the codebase, tests, or business context
Interview Process
Our 5-round process is designed to evaluate you across all competency areas. AI tools are permitted in technical rounds.
Round
Format
What We Evaluate
1 — Hiring Manager Screen
60 min, conversational
Career trajectory, mentorship philosophy, technical influence examples, communication style
2 — Take-Home + PR Discussion
72h take-home + 60 min live
Navigating unfamiliar code, ownership and decomposition discipline visible in your PR, root-cause judgment, AI tool usage
3 — System Design + Artifact Critique
60 min, Miro board
Requirements gathering, schema/API design, trade-off articulation, calibrated code-review judgment on a teammate's PR
4 — Team Interview (conditional)
30 min, behavioral
Collaboration patterns, mentorship behavior, negotiation behavior with cross-functional partners
5 — Culture Add
30 min, People Team
Organizational values alignment
Round 4 is conditional: it runs when the team needs additional behavioral signal after Rounds 2 and 3, and is otherwise skipped. Your recruiter will tell you whether it's scheduled before your loop is finalized.
The Round 2 (Take-Home + PR Discussion) and Round 3 (System Design) exercises are drawn from real payments problems — invoice payment allocation and credit-availability calculation — so the technical evaluation is grounded in the work you'd actually be doing.
What You’ll Receive
- Competitive compensation
- Employer-sponsored 401(k) with match
- Comprehensive medical, dental, and vision coverage
- Flexible time off and hybrid work environment
- Opportunity to build and scale a critical function at a high-growth fintech company
The anticipated annual salary range for this role is $175,000–$195,000. Actual compensation and title will be commensurate with experience, qualifications, knowledge, and skills.