Principal Engineer
Role Overview
Principal Engineer – Backend is a high-impact individual contributor role providing technical leadership across backend engineering.
The role shapes distributed financial systems and requires an AI-first mindset, including exploration of emerging protocols such as MCP.
Key Skills for This Role
Full Job Posting
Opportunity
Principal Engineer – Backend is a high-impact individual contributor role providing technical leadership across backend engineering.
The role shapes distributed financial systems and requires an AI-first mindset, including exploration of emerging protocols such as MCP.
What you'll do
- Set architecture and technical direction for large-scale backend systems; build secure, scalable, resilient distributed platforms.
- Solve cross-system and cross-team technical problems; establish patterns and standards and improve reliability, observability, performance, and developer productivity.
- Advise engineering and product leadership, address systemic challenges and technical debt, and influence strategy across organizational boundaries.
- Identify valuable AI and agentic technology uses, including LLMs, developer tooling, MCP, and agent-based architectures.
- Partner across engineering, product, security, infrastructure, and data; coordinate technical initiatives across distributed teams.
- Mentor engineers, leads, and architects; promote excellence in system design, reliability, security, testing, observability, and operational readiness.
- Communicate complex technical concepts to technical and non-technical stakeholders and evaluate emerging technologies.
What we're looking for
- Extensive large-scale distributed systems and backend platform experience; expertise in architecture, APIs, microservices, data-intensive systems, and cloud-native architectures.
- Deep knowledge of consistency, availability, fault tolerance, concurrency, distributed transactions, messaging, event-driven architecture, and scalability.
- Experience leading architecture and technical strategy across teams, translating ambiguous problems into scalable solutions, and operating significant-scale systems.
- Strong understanding of cloud infrastructure, observability, production operations, and modern software engineering practices.
- Experience with AI/LLM technologies and interest in AI-first engineering systems and workflows.
- Familiarity with AI agents, MCP, tool calling, or agentic workflows is highly desirable.
- Excellent communication, stakeholder influence, mentoring, and product-minded judgment; comfortable in a globally distributed cross-functional environment.
About Payoneer
Payoneer is a global financial platform connecting businesses to the global economy and serving customers and partners in more than 190 countries and territories.
Its financial workflows include global payments, compliance, multi-currency services, workforce management, working capital, and business intelligence.
Success and working principles
Success means shaping critical platform architecture, enabling engineering teams, raising technical standards, advancing AI-first engineering, and improving platform scalability, reliability, security, and efficiency.
Payoneer's stated working principles include customer partnership, accountability, continuous improvement, and helping colleagues grow.
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