Staff Engineer, Risk Platform

About the Role As a Staff Engineer on the Risk Platform, you will be a senior technical leader and hands-on builder. You’ll own critical parts of our real-time detection platform and client-facing risk and fraud management products, setting the technical direction and raising the engineering bar while partnering with cross-functional teams. What You'll Do

• Lead the technical direction of core risk services, including real-time detection, decision engines, and risk tooling, ensuring reliability, scalability, and cost-efficiency under high throughput and low-latency constraints.
• Design and evolve system architecture for distributed, event-driven risk systems (microservices, streaming pipelines, feature stores, model serving layers) that support global products and regulatory requirements.
• Own end-to-end delivery of complex initiatives: from high-level design and technical specifications, to implementation, rollout strategies, and continuous improvement.
• Be deeply hands-on in code and design, writing high-quality production code (primarily in Java/Spring Boot) and driving high-impact design reviews, RFCs, and architecture discussions.
• Partner closely with the Engineering Manager and Product Manager to shape the roadmap, define technical milestones, and translate business and risk objectives into robust engineering solutions.
• Champion engineering excellence by defining and enforcing standards for code quality, observability, reliability, security, and performance across the Risk Platform stack.
• Improve detection effectiveness by working with data and ML teams to integrate models, rules, and features into production systems, and by designing experimentation and evaluation capabilities.
• Drive operational excellence by improving on-call readiness, incident response, postmortems, SLIs/SLOs, capacity planning, and resilience patterns (graceful degradation, fallbacks, retries, timeouts, backpressure).
• Mentor and uplevel other engineers, including senior ICs: provide technical coaching, pair programming, design guidance, and feedback that helps them do the best work of their careers.
• Collaborate across teams (platform, data, SRE, security, and other product engineering teams) to define clear interfaces, SLAs, and ownership boundaries for shared services and infrastructure.
• Identify and pay down technical debt deliberately, balancing short-term impact with long-term platform health and enabling faster, safer delivery over time. What We're Looking For
• 10+ years of backend engineering experience, including substantial time owning and operating complex, distributed systems in production.
• Deep experience in risk, fraud, or fintech systems (e.g., payments, banking, trading, or similar high-stakes domains).
• Strong proficiency in Java, including multi-threading, high-concurrency patterns, performance tuning, and networked service design (I/O/NIO, HTTP/TCP, REST).
• Hands-on experience with distributed system design, including event-driven architectures, partitioning/sharding, consistency models, caching strategies, and resiliency patterns.
• Proficiency with Spring / Spring Boot and build tools such as Gradle or Maven.
• Practical experience with containerization and orchestration, particularly Docker and Kubernetes, in production environments.
• Solid understanding of observability and operations: monitoring, tracing, alerting, and reliability practices.
• Experience mentoring and uplifting other engineers.
• Ability to translate business and risk objectives into robust engineering solutions and collaborate with product managers. Nice to Have
• Experience integrating ML models and rules into production risk systems, and working with data scientists.
• Familiarity with graph technologies, streaming/data pipelines, and/or large language models (LLMs) in risk contexts.