Hybrid Principal Software Developer – Payments

at Plusgrade

• Job title: Principal Software Developer – Payments
• Job type: Full Time
• Experience level: Lead
• Salary: Not specified
• Degree requirement: Bachelor's Degree
• Tech skills: AWS, Cloud, Distributed Systems, Docker, Google Cloud Platform, Java, React, SDLC, Spring, TypeScript
• Location requirements: Hybrid, Montreal, Canada

About the role

• Principal Software Engineer leading the Payments team to develop secure and scalable payment solutions for travel partners. Collaborating with various business units to enhance transaction processing.

Responsibilities

• Provide technical leadership for the Payments team, taking ownership and technically driving the team to deliver high-quality products and features that create clear business value in an Agile development environment.
• Act as the principal architect for payments: design and evolve end-to-end payment flows and services, ensuring they are secure, resilient, scalable, and cost-effective.
• Participate in and often lead Architecture Assessments & Reviews as a subject matter expert, especially for payment-related initiatives and integrations.
• Serve as the technical SME for payments within Plusgrade, with deep expertise across authorization, capture, refunds, reconciliation, tokenization, risk/fraud signals, and settlement.
• Own the design and implementation of payment service provider (PSP) integrations, including orchestration across multiple PSPs, routing logic, and failover strategies.
• Define and drive best practices for PSP integration patterns (e.g., API contracts, idempotency, error handling, retries, webhooks/callbacks), ensuring consistency and reliability across providers.
• Partner with Product, Security, Compliance, and Finance to ensure our payment systems align with industry standards and regulations.
• Take the initiative to identify and solve important problems, making balanced trade-offs with respect to the whole system and business value.
• Evangelize OOP principles, clean code practices, and design patterns, and hold a high bar for code quality, reliability, and maintainability in payments and beyond.
• Research, evaluate, and propose new technologies, tools, and payment solutions that can improve our platform and accelerate delivery.
• Provide support and guidance to less experienced peers, acting as a mentor and role model for engineers across multiple teams.

Requirements

• 8+ years of relevant software development experience, including substantial time as a senior or staff engineer owning complex, distributed systems.
• Extensive experience designing and implementing software in Java (Spring framework) and good knowledge working with modern front-end technologies (e.g., TypeScript and React) in a full-stack or API-centric environment.
• Payments domain expertise, including:
• - Hands-on experience integrating with multiple payment service providers (PSPs) (e.g., design, build, and maintenance of PSP integrations and payment orchestration).
• - Strong understanding of payment flows (auth/capture/refund/voids), reconciliation, and operational considerations for high-volume transactional systems.
• Proven experience technically leading teams or large initiatives with a delivery-focused mindset.
• Experience using a cloud platform (AWS preferred), deploying and operating applications in the cloud (e.g., AWS ECS, EKS, GCP), and using Docker and observability tooling (e.g., Datadog).
• Experience building secure, reliable, performant, scalable, and cost-effective cloud applications in production.
• Extended experience with SDLC processes and Agile practices, and a track record of shipping well-tested, high-quality features fast and frequently.
• Remarkable debugging and problem-solving skills, with a passion for finding elegant solutions to complex technical and product problems.

Benefits

• RRSP/401(k) matching
• Comprehensive health plans
• Flexible paid time off
• Annual upgrade credit
• Annual physical wellness credit
• Annual mental wellness credit
• Flexibility to work remotely
• Parental leave top-up
• Adventure Pass