Staff Engineer (Payments)

• Deep technical expertise in payment processing and settlement systems, with strong backend engineering skills.
• Be the subject matter expert in Payments, influencing the technical strategy and mentoring other engineers to raise the bar for engineering craftsmanship.
• Work flexibly in our Sydney office with two team connect days in a hybrid environment.

Write your story with a career at Zip

We are Zip, a global Buy Now, Pay Later company providing fair and seamless solutions for millions of people. We exist to create a world where people can live fearlessly today, knowing they are in control of tomorrow. Focused on product innovation, the financial well-being of our customers and merchants is at the heart of everything we do. We are a values-led business, guided by Customer First, Own It, Stronger Together, and Change the Game.

Join Zip's Technology function, responsible for building and maintaining seamless, secure, and sustainable platforms that enable customers to shop with confidence and merchant partners to grow their brands.

As part of the Payments team, you'll work with the very latest tech to solve complex, interesting challenges at scale. This squad has a broad remit for products ranging from Card lifecycle management and Open Banking to integration with New Payment Platform and Payment Gateways. You'll learn and grow through experimentation, enhancing existing features, and building new ones with the backing of a tight-knit team.

What you'll own

As a highly skilled Staff Engineer in the Payments Rail Team, you will:

• Lead the design of high-performance, resilient, and secure payment systems supporting multiple rails (card, bank transfer, direct debit, real-time payments).
• Set and drive the technical strategy for payment infrastructure, identifying opportunities for optimisation, scaling, reliability, and cost-efficiency.
• Assess technical debt for Payments Rail, providing a roadmap for its reduction, and create a capability roadmap aligned with company goals.
• Collaborate across product, risk/compliance, operations, and finance to ensure the payment ecosystem meets business goals and regulatory needs.
• Act as a subject matter expert in payments, driving incident response, post-mortems, and continuous improvement for excellent uptime and trust.

What you'll bring to the team

Zipsters work on a broad range of initiatives, and our skills and experiences all look a little different. What really matters to us is that you're a great fit with our four Values, and have a desire to learn and grow. So whether you meet some or all of the desirable attributes below, we'd still love to hear from you:

• 8+ years of software engineering experience, with at least 3-5 years in payments, fintech, or financial systems.
• Deep understanding of payment rails (card networks, bank transfer systems like ACH/BECS/NPP, real-time payments) and the merchant-acquirer-issuer models.
• Strong backend engineering skills in C#, .net, Java etc.
• Proven experience designing and operating distributed systems that handle high throughput, low-latency, and fault-tolerant transactions.
• Solid understanding of payment system challenges: idempotency, reconciliation, settlement latency, error handling, and auditing/logging.
• Familiarity with security and compliance in payments (e.g., PCI-DSS, ISO 8583/20022, data tokenisation).
• Excellent communication skills, able to articulate technical vision, influence strategy, and mentor other engineers.
• A mindset that embraces AI and new tools to adapt, learn, and grow.
• An aptitude for identifying and managing risks. Whether you are a People Manager or an Individual Contributor, we are all leaders at Zip, therefore effective risk management is important to how we run our business and part of all our roles.
• Our values in your DNA: Customer First, Own It, Stronger Together, and Change the Game.

What you'll get in return

As we write this next exciting chapter in our story, we will continue to move at pace and embrace change. For you, this might mean opportunities to learn new skills with hands-on experience, broader responsibilities, or the buzz of seeing your work impact customers faster.

Zip is a place where you'll get out exactly what you put in. When you join the team, we'll do our best to make sure you can be yourself and surround yourself with smart, friendly colleagues and leaders who have your back, so that you can make the big things happen.

Zipsters tell us these are just some of the best things about working here. You’ll also receive:

• 25 days paid leave annually, including birthday leave and quarterly wellbeing days.
• 16 weeks paid parental leave for primary carers, and 4 weeks for supporting carers.
• Family support policies including miscarriage bereavement leave and domestic violence leave.
• Mental health and wellness initiatives, including $299 annual wellbeing allowance, free access for you and family members to our Wellbeing platform Sonder, discounted private health insurance, and great rates on fitness sessions through ClassPass.
• 2 days paid volunteering leave, 2 days study leave, and 2 days religious or cultural leave per year.
• Fee-free Zip products, and discounts with Zip merchant partners (AU).
• Team social events, epic offices, free breakfast daily, and weekly free lunches (Sydney and Melbourne).

Be a part of a team that reflects the diversity of our customers

We pride ourselves on being a workplace that provides equal opportunities to people of all ages, cultural backgrounds, sexual orientations, gender identities, abilities, veteran status, and everything else that makes you unique.

Equally, we’re committed to ensuring our recruitment processes are accessible and inclusive. Please let us know If there are any adjustments that need to be made to ensure you have a fair and equitable experience.

And finally…get to know us

Zip Co Limited (ASX: ZIP) is a digital financial services company, offering innovative, people-centred products. Operating in two core markets - Australia and New Zealand (ANZ) and the US, Zip offers access to point-of-sale credit and digital payment services, connecting millions of customers with its global network of tens of thousands of merchants.

We’re proud to be a values-led business and our values - Customer First, Own it, Stronger Together and Change the Game - guide us in everything we do.

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