Principal Software Engineer, AMER Payments
Hands-on principal engineer at Trustly who owns the contracts between US payments, bank connectivity and risk systems — writing production code about two-thirds of the time, leading the US Platform squad, running peak-event readiness, and leading cross-domain incident response. Core focus: distributed payments systems, versioned API contracts and contract tests.
- Compensation
- $260K–$390K / yr
- Location
- San Francisco
- Work setup
- Hybrid
- Seniority
- Principal
- Employment
- Full time
- Experience
- 15+ years
- Category
- Software engineering
- Posted
Skills
Must have
- 15+ years in software engineering with principal-level scope across multiple teams, still writing production code
- Designed, built and operated payment, banking or ledger systems at scale
- Record of setting technical direction through code and clear writing
- Product judgment: make platform trade-offs with business and product leaders
- Deep distributed systems expertise: consistency, idempotency, concurrency, failure handling
- Practical, current use of AI in engineering, with judgment on its limits in regulated systems
Nice to have
- Experience with ACH, RTP, FedNow or open banking, and with unifying platforms across regions
Full description
WHO WE ARE
Our ambition is to make open banking real for everyone. We're building the network that lets people pay and get paid straight from their bank account, instantly and securely, so more of every payment reaches the people it's meant for. We're a global leader in open banking payments: since 2008 we've connected more than 12,000 banks, and today we process more than $100 billion in payments a year.
ABOUT THE ROLE
Trustly moves money between consumers, merchants and banks across the US. This is a hands-on engineering role. You'll own, in code, the contracts between our payments systems, bank connectivity and risk decisioning, and you'll build the hardest cross-system changes yourself. Expect to spend about two-thirds of your time building.
What you'll do
- Write and merge code on the critical path every week: reference implementations, contract tests and the hardest fixes.
- Own the contracts between payments, bank connectivity and risk as versioned specs in the repo, with contract tests in CI that fail the build when a contract breaks.
- Build the first version of hard cross-domain changes, then hand them to the owning team.
- Own our global API specification, with the engineers who own our merchant-facing APIs.
- Lead the technical response to any P0 or P1 that crosses domains, as part of the escalation rotation.
- Run peak-event readiness yourself: load tests, failure drills and capacity calls.
- Lead the US Platform squad: set platform priorities and contracts across payments, bank connectivity and infrastructure, and weigh them against the needs of the business squads, with program support from our Core Payments TPMs.
What you bring
- Typically 15+ years in software engineering, with principal-level scope across multiple teams, and still writing production code.
- Designed, built and operated payment, banking or ledger systems at scale.
- A record of setting technical direction through code and clear writing, not slides.
- Product judgment: you can make platform trade-offs with business and product leaders, not only engineers.
- Deep distributed systems expertise: consistency, idempotency, concurrency, failure handling.
- Practical, current use of AI in engineering, with clear judgment on its limits in regulated systems.
Nice to have
- Experience with ACH, RTP, FedNow or open banking, and with unifying platforms across regions.
LOCATION & WORKPLACE
This is a hybrid role based out of our San Francisco office. We look for team members to be in the office Tuesday through Thursday.