Senior Software Engineer

Job title: Senior Software Engineer

Reports to: Director, Engineering

Department: Development

Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

About Priority:

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.

We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.

At Priority, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.

About the Role:

This role is focused on designing, building, and scaling high-impact solutions that improve how we develop, operate, and optimize our platform. The Senior Software Engineer will lead technical design and implementation for complex initiatives, translating ambiguous problems into scalable technical solutions and helping move ideas from concept to production. This role requires strong technical judgment, architectural thinking, and the ability to balance rapid experimentation with production rigor, reliability, and maintainability.

This role is focused on designing, building, and scaling high-impact solutions across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.

You will lead the development of AI-powered product capabilities, helping prototype and productionize features that deliver meaningful value to customers. This includes working through ambiguity to translate new ideas into reliable, production-ready systems. You will also contribute to building and improving AI-driven risk and fraud systems, ensuring solutions are accurate, scalable, and responsive to evolving threats. In parallel, you will help develop AI-enabled internal tools and workflows that improve how we build and operate the platform, including developer experience, product development processes, and broader business functions.

The Senior Software Engineer is responsible for leading technical design and implementation for complex systems, ensuring solutions meet expectations for scalability, reliability, and performance. This role requires strong engineering fundamentals, sound technical judgment, and the ability to operate independently in fast-moving environments. You will partner closely with engineers, Software Development Engineers in Test, Product Managers, and Product Designers to translate business and product goals into reliable technical delivery and measurable outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Owns the design, delivery, and operation of complex services or systems, ensuring high standards for reliability, scalability, and maintainability.

• Leads technical design for features and systems, making sound architectural decisions and evaluating trade-offs across performance, reliability, and development velocity.

• Drives implementation of solutions that align with system architecture, product requirements, and long-term platform evolution.

• Designs and maintains comprehensive automated testing strategies that validate system behavior, prevent regressions, and support safe, rapid delivery.

• Ensures systems integrate effectively into CI/CD pipelines with strong quality gates and reliable deployment practices.

• Establishes and reinforces engineering standards through code reviews, design reviews, and mentorship.

• Owns system reliability by defining and improving observability through metrics, logging, and tracing.

• Designs and implements alerting strategies that detect issues early and align with system SLIs/SLOs.

• Leads debugging and resolution of complex production issues, driving root cause analysis and long-term fixes.

• Defines and tracks system-level KPIs (e.g., latency, error rates, throughput) and contributes to defining product KPIs that measure customer outcomes.

• Ensures delivered solutions are measured, observable, and aligned with intended product and business impact.

• Collaborates closely with software engineers, product managers, and product designers to shape solutions that deliver reliable and intuitive customer experiences.

• Translates product requirements and user workflows into scalable technical designs that maintain system integrity and performance.

• Identifies and addresses technical risks, scalability challenges, and reliability gaps across systems.

• Drives improvements to system design, development workflows, and engineering practices within the team.

• Leverages AI-assisted engineering tools to accelerate development, testing, debugging, and operational analysis while ensuring correctness and maintainability.

• Monitors and optimizes usage of AI-enabled systems where applicable, including awareness of performance, cost (e.g., token usage), and reliability trade-offs.

• Mentors engineers and contributes to raising the technical capability and engineering standards of the team.

• Actively contributes to improving team effectiveness, system quality, and engineering culture.

What Success Looks Like:

• Owns systems that operate reliably, scale effectively, and meet defined performance and availability expectations.

• Designs and delivers solutions that balance speed, quality, and long-term maintainability.

• Technical decisions improve system architecture, reduce risk, and enable future product evolution.

• Systems are observable, measurable, and supported by effective alerting and operational practices.

• Production issues are identified, diagnosed, and resolved quickly, with durable fixes that reduce recurrence.

• Testing strategies and validation systems provide strong confidence in system behavior and release quality.

• System and product KPIs are clearly defined, measured, and used to evaluate success and guide improvements.

• Engineering work is consistently aligned with customer outcomes and business impact.

• Collaborates effectively with engineers, product managers, and product designers to deliver high-quality product experiences.

• Provides technical leadership within the team and is a trusted partner in design and execution decisions.

• Elevates team performance through mentorship, code reviews, and improved engineering practices.

• Demonstrates strong ownership, accountability, and continuous improvement mindset.

Candidate Requirements:

Required:

• 5+ years of software engineering experience, with a track record of delivering high-quality software in production environments.

• Proven ability to design, build, and maintain reliable services or systems with moderate complexity.

• Strong experience contributing to technical design and making sound engineering decisions within a team.

• Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including test-driven development (TDD), and building scalable, maintainable, and observable systems.

• Experience designing and implementing APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts.

• Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful APIs, backend services, and service-oriented design principles.

• Strong understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including writing efficient queries and contributing to well-structured relational schemas.

• Experience working effectively within modern development environments, including version control systems (e.g., Git) and Agile development practices.

• Ability to debug complex issues across services using logs, metrics, and traces.

• Demonstrated ability to identify technical risks, evaluate trade-offs, and propose effective solutions.

• Experience mentoring junior engineers and contributing to team engineering standards and practices.

• Experience using AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity, testing, and debugging workflows.

• Exposure to integrating AI-enabled features or workflows into applications is a plus.

• The primary technology stack for the Innovation Studio team includes: Node.js/NestJS, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD and observability tooling, along with AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Candidates should have strong proficiency in backend and cloud-native development, with the ability to independently design and deliver complex solutions in distributed systems environments.

Preferred:

• Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.

• Advanced degree (e.g., Master’s) in a relevant technical discipline.

Work Environment & Culture:

We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution . We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.

Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.

Compensation & Benefits:

Compensation range: $113k - $139k CAD
We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.

Financial Wellness

• Bonus programs

• Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs

Time Off

• 3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one

Growth & Development

• Education expense reimbursement

• Leadership development programs

• Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support

We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.

Traditional Physical Requirements:

• Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.

• Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.

• Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).

Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.