Staff Software Engineer, Payments Acquiring
Seattle, WA · US - CA - Bay Area - Remote · USD 263,600-395,400 · Remote · Posted Oct 8, 2026
At a glance
- Workplace
- Remote
- Location
- Seattle, WA · US - CA - Bay Area - Remote
- Salary
- USD 263,600-395,400
About the role
- As a Staff Software Engineer on the Acquiring team at Block, you will bring deep card payments experience to some of the most complex technical work on our roadmap.
- This is a hands-on role where you will build systems and tooling, debug at the message level, and turn your payments expertise into durable capabilities that other engineers can use.
Responsibilities
- Bring deep card acceptance expertise to the team, reading network specifications, ISO 8583 messages, mandates, and interchange rules, and turning them into sound engineering decisions.
- Own the technical direction of your projects from design through production rollout, and lead the engineers working on them.
- Partner with technical leads, product and finance operations partners, and stakeholders across Square, Cash App, and Afterpay to shape solutions where card-network requirements intersect with Block's acquiring platform.
- Stay deeply hands-on: write production code, build testing and certification tooling, analyze network messages, review designs and code, and debug issues down to the protocol and field level.
- Make and defend the technical calls on routing, retries, and processing cost, backed by data on authorization rates and fees.
- Establish shared frameworks, standards, tooling, and practices that make payments expertise durable so the team makes good payments decisions without routing every question through you.
- Raise the technical capability of engineers around you through design guidance, code reviews, mentorship, documentation, and clear technical judgment.
- Build with AI agents across the engineering lifecycle, and help set the patterns for using them safely on systems that move money.
- Share operational ownership of critical financial systems through on-call, incident response, and continuous improvements to reliability and correctness.
Requirements
- Deep card payments experience at the message level: built or run integrations that talk to networks, acquirers, or processors (ISO 8583 or an acquirer's host format), not only called a payment provider's API.
- Experience with the hard cases in real card transactions, such as partial and incremental authorizations, reversals, tips, currency conversion, and interchange qualification.
- Strong hands-on software engineering experience building and operating highly reliable financial or payments systems at scale, with solid habits in design review, automated testing, and safe, observable rollouts.
- A track record of leading technically complex projects from design through delivery and setting technical direction for the engineers working on them.
- Experience creating durable technical leverage — frameworks, standards, tooling, architecture, or practices that other engineers and teams adopt.
- Broad understanding of how a card payment moves end to end, with depth in areas such as card data security and tokenization, routing, authorization, capture, clearing and settlement, reconciliation, interchange and processing costs, or chargebacks.
- Solid understanding of card network rules (Visa, Mastercard, American Express, Discover, and US debit networks), and of how acquirers, processors, payment facilitators, and sponsor banks fit between sellers and the networks.
- Daily experience building with AI coding agents, and good judgment about when their output is right.
- Willingness to participate in an on-call rotation for critical financial systems.
Preferred qualifications
- Acquiring or merchant-side experience is ideal
- Direct network connection is a strong plus
- ISO 20022 is a plus
Benefits
- Remote work
- Medical insurance
- Flexible time off
- Retirement savings plans
- Modern family planning
Workplace
- Works US West Coast hours, from our Bay Area or Seattle offices or remotely within the Pacific time zone.
Skills
- ISO 8583
- ISO 20022
