Staff Software Engineer

Job title: Staff 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:

Staff Software Engineers operate at the domain level, responsible for shaping system design and improving reliability across multiple teams.

A workstream is a product-aligned engineering organization responsible for delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities. Within a workstream, domains are composed of multiple value lanes (teams), each with its own charter and outcomes. Staff Software Engineers operate across a domain, ensuring that systems owned by multiple teams are designed consistently, operate reliably, and scale effectively.

This role focuses on leading the design and evolution of systems across teams, improving system cohesion, and driving consistent engineering practices. You will partner closely with Software Engineers, Software Development Engineers in Test, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Product Designers to ensure systems support customer workflows and business outcomes.

Staff Software Engineers influence technical direction across teams, improve system reliability and scalability, and mentor engineers while elevating engineering practices across the domain.

This role is focused on leading the design and delivery of high-impact solutions across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.

You will drive the development of AI-powered product capabilities, helping teams move from rapid prototyping to reliable, production-ready systems that deliver meaningful customer value. This includes guiding implementation approaches and ensuring consistency in how AI-driven features are built within and across teams. You will also contribute to the design and evolution of AI-driven risk and fraud systems, ensuring solutions are accurate, scalable, and resilient to changing conditions. In parallel, you will help advance AI-enabled tools and workflows that improve how we build and operate the platform, including developer experience, product development processes, and broader business functions.

The Staff Software Engineer is responsible for leading technical design within a domain, influencing system architecture, and driving improvements in engineering practices across teams. This role requires strong technical expertise, sound architectural judgment, and the ability to influence technical decisions without direct authority. You will partner closely with engineers, engineering managers, product managers, and product designers to translate product strategy into scalable, reliable systems that deliver measurable customer and business outcomes.

Responsibilities:

• Leads the design and evolution of complex systems spanning multiple services, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across a product domain.

• Defines and drives architectural patterns, service boundaries, and system interactions that enable teams to build and evolve systems consistently.

• Guides technical design across teams, influencing implementation decisions to ensure alignment with architectural standards and domain-level technical direction.

• Evaluates trade-offs across performance, reliability, scalability, and development velocity, helping teams make sound engineering decisions.

• Establishes and improves testing strategies, validation patterns, and quality standards across multiple systems to ensure consistent system behavior and reliability.

• Ensures systems integrate effectively into CI/CD pipelines with strong quality gates, automation, and deployment safety mechanisms.

• Drives reliability and observability practices across systems, ensuring services are instrumented with meaningful metrics, logs, and traces.

• Defines alerting strategies and ensures systems align with SLIs/SLOs, enabling proactive detection and resolution of issues.

• Guides teams in incident response, root cause analysis, and implementation of systemic fixes that reduce recurrence.

• Defines and influences system-level and domain-level KPIs that measure reliability, performance, and customer impact.

• Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure technical solutions align with product goals, customer workflows, and business outcomes.

• Identifies systemic risks, architectural gaps, and scaling challenges across services, driving initiatives to improve system resilience and platform stability.

• Leads cross-team efforts within a domain to improve engineering practices, system design, and development workflows.

• Leverages AI-enabled engineering practices to improve developer productivity, testing, and operational efficiency across teams.

• Guides teams in adopting AI responsibly, including monitoring performance, reliability, and cost where applicable.

• Mentors senior engineers and helps develop technical leaders within the organization.

• Drives consistency in engineering standards, design practices, and system quality across teams within a domain.

What Success Looks Like:

• Systems across a domain are scalable, reliable, and consistently aligned with architectural standards.

• Technical decisions improve long-term system health, reduce complexity, and enable faster, safer product delivery.

• Multiple teams build and evolve systems using consistent patterns, reducing fragmentation and operational risk.

• Architectural guidance enables teams to move faster while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability.

• Reliability practices (observability, alerting, incident response) are strong and consistently applied across systems.

• Production issues are reduced through proactive design, improved validation strategies, and systemic fixes.

• System and domain-level KPIs are clearly defined, measurable, and used to drive continuous improvement.

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

• Cross-team collaboration is effective, with strong alignment between engineering, product managers, and product designers.

• Staff engineers are trusted technical leaders who influence decisions across teams without direct authority.

• Engineering practices improve across teams through mentorship, guidance, and standardization.

• Teams demonstrate increased consistency, productivity, and system quality as a result of Staff-level leadership.

Candidate Requirements:

Required:

System Design & Architecture

• Proven experience leading the design and evolution of complex systems within a product domain or across multiple services.

• Deep experience building and operating scalable, reliable, and resilient distributed systems.

• Experience designing and building APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts that support composability and reliable integration.

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

Software Development & Delivery

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

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

Data & Technical Skills

• Deep understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including designing scalable relational schemas, optimizing query performance, and contributing to data architecture decisions.

Debugging, Observability & Reliability

• Strong experience debugging complex, distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces.

• Experience building and operating systems with strong observability and reliability practices.

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Strong ability to influence technical decisions across teams and contribute to domain-level technical direction.

• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and elevate engineering practices within a team or domain.

• Ability to identify technical risks, evaluate trade-offs, and guide teams toward sound engineering decisions.

Modern Engineering Practices (AI & Automation)

• Experience applying AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity, testing, and system reliability.

• Exposure to designing or integrating AI-enabled features or workflows within products or internal systems.

• Familiarity with emerging AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces.

Tech Stack

• The primary technology stack for the Innovation Studio team includes: Node.js/NestJS, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD and observability tooling, along with AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Candidates should bring deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud architecture, with the ability to shape technical direction and architectural standards across this stack.

Preferred:

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

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

Typical Experience & Leveling Context:

Staff Software Engineers typically have approximately 8–12 years of experience, leading the design and evolution of systems across multiple teams within a domain.

At this level, the focus is on shaping system architecture, improving reliability and consistency across teams, and driving engineering practices that enable scalable and maintainable systems.

Leveling is based on demonstrated scope, ownership, influence, and impact, not tenure alone. Engineers may progress at different rates depending on the complexity of problems solved, systems owned, and contributions across teams and domains.

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: $128K-$168K 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.