Software Engineer, Staff - Shift4

We’re looking for an experienced and driven Staff Engineer to join our technology leadership team. In this role, you’ll lead key cross-organizational initiatives, provide technical guidance, and shape engineering practices that power our scalable, business-critical systems in the online transactions and payments space.

You’ll play a pivotal role in leading technical transformation, supporting developers, and elevating the platform with a long-term view — all while staying hands-on where it matters.

Responsibilities

Be a Technical Thought Leader

• Champion and lead strategic initiatives across R&D: platform modernization, performance at scale, developer experience, and major migrations.

• Serve as a trusted technical advisor, offering design reviews, setting architectural standards, and guiding engineers through complex challenges.

• Own and evolve shared libraries and frameworks that empower teams and promote engineering consistency.

Explore, Prove, Evolve

• Lead PoCs and evaluate innovative technologies (like Aerospike or AI developer tools) to drive breakthroughs in performance, scalability, and maintainability.

• Help Shift4 stay ahead of the curve by proactively identifying and addressing tech debt or architectural limitations.

Elevate Tooling, DevOps, and Quality

• Partner with TechOps and platform teams to enhance CI/CD (GitLab pipelines), observability, and internal tooling.

• Define and promote best practices around code quality, static analysis, and release automation to ensure excellence at every commit.

Mentor, Inspire, Influence

• Provide matrix-style leadership across engineering squads, mentoring engineers, guiding technical decisions, and raising the bar for what "great" looks like.

• Foster a culture of shared ownership, curiosity, and cross-team collaboration.

• Support agile practices that enable autonomy, continuous delivery, and long-term quality.

Requirements

• 7+ years of backend engineering experience with Java and Spring (Spring Boot) – required.

• Proven track record in technical leadership roles, guiding architectural decisions, and driving change across teams.

• Experience building and maintaining high-performance, distributed systems in production.

• Deep understanding of DevOps workflows, deployment pipelines, and platform tooling.

• Familiarity with technologies like RabbitMQ, Hazelcast, and Aerospike – an advantage.

• Strong interpersonal skills – able to influence, guide, and inspire technical teams.

• Comfortable balancing strategic vision with hands-on technical execution.

#LI-YR1