Principal Staff Engineer , Financial Services

About Audax

audax means courage. To have the courage to change the banking scene, eliminating constraints caused by existing legacy infrastructure. Our mission is to empower banks and financial institutions to scale and modernise at speed, reaching new customers without breaking the bank.

We began our journey supplying services to and powering Standard Chartered’s white-label plug and play Banking-as-a-Service (BaaS) solution, Standard Chartered nexus, through our technology capabilities. At audax, we seek go-getters who are hungry for growth and can bring fresh perspectives.

Website - https://audax.io/

Summary

We are looking for a Principal Staff Engineer - Financial Services to lead architecture, design and engineering delivery for high-volume financial transaction platforms across payments, cards, transaction processing/core banking and Personal Financial Management (PFM).

As Audax is a product platform, solutions must be designed as reusable, configurable and extensible capabilities rather than bank-specific implementations. The role should enable different banks, countries and regulatory requirements through configuration, reusable components and low-code/no-code approaches where appropriate, while maintaining a common product base.

The role requires deep hands-on engineering experience in distributed systems, real-time transaction orchestration and cloud-native architecture, together with strong technical leadership, delivery ownership and the ability to lead by example.

Responsibilities

• Own architecture, direction and delivery for high-volume, real-time financial transaction processing, including orchestration, concurrency, retries, idempotency, distributed transaction handling, batch processing and bulk posting.
• Lead solution design across payments, cards, PFM and core banking/transaction-processing engines, including integrations with payment hubs, payment rails, gateways, processors and country clearing systems.
• Design financial-services capabilities as generic, reusable and configurable product features, with clear separation between core product and bank-specific rules, workflows, integration endpoints and regulatory variations; use low-code/no-code patterns where practical.
• Apply strong working knowledge of payment messaging and standards such as ISO 20022, SWIFT and PAIN messages, together with PCI DSS and Open Banking considerations, in solution and integration design.
• Architect and build cloud-native solutions using Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST/gRPC, event-driven architecture, Kubernetes with appropriate SQL/NoSQL and messaging technologies.
• Ensure systems are scalable, resilient, secure and operable, with strong observability through logs, metrics, traces and end-to-end transaction visibility for TechOps/SRE teams.
• Lead architecture and design reviews, translate product requirements into implementable technical solutions, and support teams through engineering delivery, testing, release and production readiness.
• Remain hands-on in solving complex engineering and production issues, mentor engineers, establish engineering standards and lead by example across teams.
• Apply AI-assisted development tools such as code generation, developer tooling to improve engineering efficiency, testing and code quality within the owned domain.

Requirements

• 12+ years of software engineering experience, with strong architecture and delivery experience in financial-services or high-volume transaction-processing platforms.
• Strong hands-on experience with Java, Spring Boot, microservices, REST/gRPC, distributed systems, event-driven architecture and Kubernetes.
• Demonstrated domain experience in one or more payments, cards, transaction processing/core banking or PFM, with a strong understanding of accounts, transactions and financial transaction lifecycles.
• Experience integrating with payment hubs, payment rails, gateways, processors and clearing systems, with practical understanding of ISO/SWIFT-based payment messaging.
• Strong product-engineering experience building configurable and extensible platforms that support multiple banks, countries or regulatory variants without creating separate product forks.
• Strong cloud-native experience across AWS and/or GCP, Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD, Git and infrastructure/deployment automation, with working knowledge of PostgreSQL, Cassandra or equivalent DB platforms.
• Strong understanding of scalability, performance, resilience, observability, security and production-readiness requirements for distributed transaction systems.
• Proven ability to lead architecture and technical delivery across teams while remaining hands-on, mentoring engineers and collaborating effectively with Product, Engineering, QA, SRE and Security teams.
• Experience applying AI-assisted SDLC practices to improve development efficiency, code quality, testing and engineering delivery

Why Join Us?

• Be Part of a Bold Vision – At audax, we’re not just building software – we’re transforming how financial institutions and businesses manage risk, compliance, and growth. Join a team that’s fearless in challenging the status quo.
• Flexible, People-First Workplace – We value the importance of Family, Team, Self. In that order.
• Competitive Rewards and Startup Perks – We offer competitive salaries and meaningful benefits that look after your well-being.

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You may withdraw consent for such collection, use and disclosure, and make an access or correction request in respect of your personal data, in accordance with the Policy by emailing dpo@audax.io.

Disclaimer: At Audax, we use AI to support our recruitment process, including reviewing applications and identifying candidates whose skills and experience best match our opportunities. AI assists our recruiters—it does not make hiring decisions. All applications are reviewed by our recruitment team, and hiring decisions are made by people. Please ensure the information you submit is accurate and reflects your own qualifications and experience.