Principal Engineer at Payoneer

About Payoneer Founded in 2005, Payoneer is the global financial platform that removes friction from doing business across borders, with a mission to connect the world’s underserved businesses to a rising global economy. We’re a community with over 2,500 colleagues all over the world, working to serve customers, and partners in over 190 countries and territories. By taking the complexity out of the financial workflows–including everything from global payments and compliance to multi-currency and workforce management, to providing working capital and business intelligence–we give businesses the tools they need to work efficiently worldwide and grow with confidence. Full time/ Hybrid As a Principal Engineer within Payoneer’s Business Applications domain, you are a senior technical authority responsible for shaping the long‑term architecture, engineering standards, and modernization strategy of mission‑critical financial systems. Reporting to the Domain Architect, you will operate at a domain‑wide and cross‑domain level, driving architectural decisions, influencing multiple teams, and ensuring that Payoneer’s cloud‑native transformation is scalable, secure, and sustainable. This role is ideal for a highly experienced engineer who combines deep hands‑on expertise with strategic architectural thinking, thrives in ambiguous problem spaces, and is motivated by solving complex, systemic challenges at scale. What You’ll Do Own Domain‑Level Architecture & Technical Direction • Define and evolve the target architecture for the Business Applications domain, ensuring alignment with Payoneer’s cloud, security, and platform strategies. • Act as a technical decision‑maker for high‑impact initiatives, reviewing and influencing designs across multiple teams and services. • Identify architectural risks, systemic bottlenecks, and long‑term scalability concerns—and proactively drive solutions. Drive Large‑Scale Cloud & Legacy Modernization • Lead complex, multi‑year modernization efforts, including decomposition of monoliths, domain realignment, and migration of critical systems to cloud‑native architectures. • Set principles and reference patterns for event‑driven systems, APIs, data flows, resiliency, and backward compatibility. • Partner with architects, SRE, security, and platform teams to ensure solutions meet reliability, compliance, and performance requirements. Set Engineering Excellence Standards • Define and champion engineering best practices across backend development, DevOps, observability, security, and SDLC processes. • Raise the technical bar through design reviews, architectural forums, and mentorship of Tech Leads and senior engineers. • Influence Payoneer’s “Shift Left” culture by embedding quality, security, and operability into design and development from day one. Provide Strategic Hands‑On Leadership • Stay hands‑on in critical paths: complex designs, proof‑of‑concepts, high‑risk changes, and foundational services. • Guide teams through technically challenging decisions without becoming a delivery bottleneck. • Serve as a trusted escalation point for complex production or architectural issues. Influence Across the Organization • Collaborate closely with Product, Architecture, SRE, Security, Data, and Business stakeholders to ensure technical solutions deliver real business impact. • Translate business and regulatory constraints into robust technical designs. • Act as a role model for ownership, accountability, and long‑term thinking. What We’re Looking For (Core Competencies) System‑Level Thinking Exceptional ability to reason about large, distributed systems, understand second‑ and third‑order effects, and make trade‑offs that balance speed, quality, and sustainability. Technical Authority & Influence Recognized ability to influence technical direction across teams through expertise, clarity, and credibility—without relying on formal authority. Cloud & Distributed Systems Mastery Deep experience designing and operating large‑scale, cloud‑native systems (AWS strongly preferred), including networking, security, resiliency, and cost optimization. Backend & Platform Engineering Excellence Expert‑level backend engineering skills, with hands‑on experience in multiple stacks and paradigms. Experience with Node.js is an advantage due to its significant footprint within Business Applications. DevOps, Reliability & Security Mindset Strong background in CI/CD, GitOps, infrastructure‑as‑code, observability, and production operations. Proven experience embedding security and reliability into system design. Qualifications • 10+ years of backend software engineering experience. • 5+ years operating at senior technical leadership levels (Principal Engineer, Staff Engineer, or equivalent). • Proven ownership of large‑scale modernization, platform, or cloud migration initiatives. • Deep expertise in microservices, event‑driven architectures, API design, and distributed systems. • Experience in fintech or regulated environments is a strong plus. #LI-CD1 The Payoneer Ways of Working Act as our customer’s partner on the inside Learning what they need and creating what will help them go further. Do it. Own it. Being fearlessly accountable in everything we do. Continuously improve Always striving for a higher standard than our last. Build each other up Helping each other grow, as professionals and people. If this sounds like a business, a community, and a mission you want to be part of, apply today. We are committed to providing a diverse and inclusive workplace. Payoneer is an equal opportunity employer, and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment no matter your race, color, ancestry, religion, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, age, disability status, protected veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law. If you require reasonable accommodation at any stage of the hiring process, please speak to the recruiter managing the role for any adjustments. Decisions about requests for reasonable accommodation are made on a case-by-case basis.