Senior Staff Backend Engineer, Venmo Product

What you'll do

• Set the technical direction for Venmo's CFS platform, including authentication, authorization, and fraud risk systems.
• Make technical decisions that affect multiple teams and cross organizational boundaries.
• Establish engineering standards, conventions, and processes for building, scaling, and securing systems.
• Partner with product management to ideate and translate business goals into technical solutions.
• Collaborate with Legal, Compliance, and Security teams to implement regulatory requirements like KYC, AML, and GDPR.
• Mentor senior engineers by providing technical guidance through design docs, code reviews, and knowledge sharing.
• Own the performance and availability of services while participating in on-call rotations and incident support.
• Identify and proactively address technical risks, scaling bottlenecks, and compliance gaps.

What we're looking for

• 8+ years of relevant experience and a Bachelor’s degree or an equivalent combination of education and experience.
• 12+ years of software engineering experience with significant time spent on backend platforms, authentication, or security-critical systems at scale.
• Deep expertise in Python and API management, including protocols like OAuth 2.0, OIDC, SAML, and FIDO2/WebAuthn.
• Proven track record of defining and shipping large-scale distributed systems and leading technical strategy across multiple teams.
• Hands-on comfort with backend systems at scale (Python, Java, Go, or similar) and Cloud (AWS).
• Experience designing systems that meet regulatory requirements such as KYC, AML, GDPR, or PCI.
• Strong communication skills to explain hard technical tradeoffs to non-technical stakeholders and write crisp design documents.
• Experience in managing infrastructure as code using Terraform (preferred).