Senior Staff Software Engineer
Description
Job title: Senior Staff Software Engineer - Innovation Studio
Report to: Director, Engineering
Department: Technology Resource Group
Location: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada
About Priority Commerce:
Priority Commerce is a leading financial technology company on a mission to deliver a personalized, easy-to-adopt financial toolset that accelerates cash flow and optimizes working capital for businesses. Our vision is to eliminate the barriers to unlocking revenue - empowering businesses to grow faster and operate smarter.
We achieve this through the Priority Commerce Engine, an innovative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover new revenue opportunities.
At Priority Commerce, we're driven by results. We expect our people to be known for results - bringing expertise, momentum, and relentless focus to every challenge, helping our clients and each other thrive.
Within Priority Commerce, the Innovation Studio focuses on applying emerging technologies, including AI, to accelerate product innovation and improve how we build and operate our platform.
About the Role:
This role plays a critical part in shaping the technical direction of product domains and system ecosystems across a workstream by defining cross-domain architecture, aligning systems across teams, and ensuring the platform scales reliably with the business. The position requires deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence engineering teams across multiple domains and value lanes. You’ll collaborate closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and product designers to deliver resilient, secure, and scalable financial systems. This is a high-impact opportunity to improve system cohesion, strengthen engineering practices across teams, and enable durable customer and business outcomes.
A workstream is a product-aligned engineering organization responsible for delivering a cohesive set of customer and business capabilities. Within a workstream, domains are composed of multiple value lanes (teams), each with its own charter and outcomes. Senior Staff Engineers ensure that systems across these domains operate cohesively and evolve in a consistent, scalable way.
This role is focused on driving architectural cohesion and enabling scalable, high-impact solutions across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.
You will lead the design and alignment of systems that support AI-powered product capabilities, ensuring teams can rapidly prototype and productionize features while maintaining consistency, reliability, and long-term maintainability. This includes guiding how new ideas evolve into production-ready systems across multiple teams. You will also shape the architecture of AI-driven risk and fraud systems, ensuring solutions are scalable, measurable, and resilient to evolving threats. In parallel, you will drive the adoption of AI-enabled tools and workflows across the organization, improving developer experience, product development processes, and broader business operations through consistent and scalable patterns.
The Senior Staff Software Engineer is responsible for aligning technical direction across domains, defining architectural patterns, and ensuring systems operate cohesively across teams. This role requires deep technical expertise, strong architectural judgment, and the ability to influence engineering decisions without direct authority. You will partner closely with engineering leaders, product managers, and product designers to translate product strategy into cohesive technical systems that deliver measurable customer and business outcomes.
Responsibilities:
Leads the design and evolution of complex systems spanning multiple domains, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across a workstream.
Defines and drives architectural patterns, service boundaries, and system interactions that enable multiple teams to build and evolve systems consistently.
Aligns technical design across teams and domains, ensuring systems interoperate effectively and reduce fragmentation.
Influences implementation decisions across teams to ensure alignment with architectural standards and long-term platform direction.
Evaluates trade-offs across performance, reliability, scalability, cost, and development velocity, guiding teams toward sound engineering decisions.
Establishes and scales testing strategies, validation patterns, and quality standards across domains to ensure consistent system behavior.
Ensures systems integrate effectively into CI/CD pipelines with strong quality gates, automation, and deployment safety mechanisms across teams.
Drives consistency in development workflows and engineering practices across multiple teams.
Drives reliability and observability practices across domains, ensuring services are instrumented with meaningful metrics, logs, and traces.
Defines and standardizes alerting strategies and ensures systems align with SLIs/SLOs across teams.
Leads cross-domain incident investigations, ensuring root causes are identified and systemic improvements are implemented.
Identifies and resolves systemic reliability risks, architectural gaps, and scaling challenges across domains.
Defines and influences domain-level and workstream-level KPIs that measure reliability, performance, and customer impact.
Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure technical architecture aligns with product strategy, customer workflows, and business outcomes.
Leads cross-team initiatives that improve system cohesion, engineering practices, and development efficiency.
Drives alignment across teams on shared architectural patterns and engineering standards.
Leverages AI-enabled engineering practices to improve productivity, testing, and operational efficiency across teams.
Guides teams in adopting AI responsibly, including monitoring performance, reliability, and cost.
Mentors Staff and Senior engineers, helping develop domain-level technical leaders.
Acts as a trusted technical leader across teams, influencing decisions without direct authority.
What Success Looks Like:
Systems across domains are cohesive, scalable, and consistently aligned with architectural standards.
Technical decisions reduce fragmentation and enable systems to interoperate effectively across teams.
Architectural direction enables multiple teams to move faster while maintaining high standards for quality, reliability, and maintainability.
Engineering practices are consistent across teams, improving delivery speed and system stability.
Reliability practices (observability, alerting, incident response) are strong and consistently applied across domains.
Production issues are reduced through proactive design, improved validation strategies, and systemic fixes.
Domain-level and workstream-level KPIs are clearly defined, measurable, and used to guide engineering and product decisions.
Engineering work is consistently aligned with customer outcomes and business impact.
Cross-team collaboration is strong, with clear alignment across engineering, product managers, and product designers.
Senior Staff engineers are trusted technical leaders who align teams and drive architectural cohesion.
Engineering practices improve across teams through mentorship, alignment, and standardization.
Systems demonstrate increased consistency, scalability, and reliability as a result of Senior Staff leadership.
Candidate Requirements:
Required:
Experience & Core Engineering
10–15+ years of software engineering experience, with demonstrated impact at Staff or equivalent level.
Strong proficiency in at least one programming language.
Strong understanding of core computer science fundamentals.
System Design & Architecture
Proven experience leading architecture across multiple teams or domains.
Experience aligning systems and architectures across multiple services or domains.
Demonstrated ability to design systems that scale across teams and domains with strong reliability and performance.
Deep experience building and operating scalable, reliable, and resilient distributed systems.
Experience designing and building APIs and services with clear, well-defined contracts that support composability and reliable integration.
Solid understanding of web application architecture, including RESTful APIs, backend services, and service-oriented design principles.
Software Development & Delivery
Strong understanding of modern software development practices, including test-driven development (TDD), and building scalable, maintainable, and observable systems.
Experience working effectively within modern development environments, including version control systems (e.g., Git) and Agile development practices.
Data & Technical Skills
Deep understanding of data modeling and data access patterns, including designing scalable relational schemas and optimizing query performance across systems.
Debugging, Observability & Reliability
Strong experience debugging complex, distributed systems using logs, metrics, and traces.
Experience building and operating systems with strong observability and reliability practices across teams.
Technical Leadership & Influence
Strong ability to influence technical direction, standards, and engineering practices across teams.
Proven ability to mentor engineers and develop technical leadership across teams.
Ability to identify systemic technical risks, evaluate trade-offs, and guide teams toward sound engineering decisions.
Modern Engineering Practices (AI & Automation)
Experience applying AI-assisted development tools to improve productivity, testing, and system reliability.
Experience designing or integrating AI-enabled systems or workflows.
Familiarity with emerging AI-native development patterns, including structured inputs/outputs and automation-friendly interfaces.
Tech Stack
The primary technology stack for the Innovation Studio team includes: Node.js/NestJS, Python, AWS, Kubernetes, and modern CI/CD and observability tooling, along with AI platforms such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Gemini. Candidates should bring deep expertise in distributed systems and cloud architecture, with the ability to shape technical direction and architectural standards across this stack.
Preferred:
Experience in fintech, payments, lending, or other regulated financial systems.
Experience operating across multiple domains or large-scale product ecosystems.
Bachelor’s, Master’s, or PhD in Computer Science, Engineering, or a related technical field, or equivalent practical experience.
Work Environment & Culture:
We believe that performance and experience go hand in hand - an exceptional employee experience is earned through contribution. We are a results-driven team, grounded in our core values: ownership, authenticity, service, trust, innovation, and camaraderie.
Our culture is built for those who want to make an impact. We challenge each other to grow, celebrate progress, and support one another through shared goals and real connection. Whether you're building technology, serving clients, or supporting internal teams, you’ll be part of a company that empowers you to perform at your best and be known for results.
Compensation and Benefits:
Compensation range: $160k - $209k CAD
We invest in the whole employee - personally and professionally. Our benefits package is designed to support your well-being, growth, and success - both inside and outside of work.
Financial Wellness
Bonus programs
Financial wellness resources and employee discount programs
Health & Well-being
Medical, dental, and vision coverage
Mental health support for employees and dependents through Lyra Health
Family planning and women’s health benefits through Carrot
Gym membership reimbursement and virtual wellness programs (including yoga)
Time Off
3 weeks PTO to start, with unlimited PTO after year one
Growth & Development
Education expense reimbursement
Leadership development programs
Certified Payments Professional (CPP) certification support
We believe great performance starts with feeling supported - and we’ve built our benefits with that in mind.
Traditional Physical Requirements:
Requires prolonged sitting, standing, bending, stooping and stretching.
Requires the ability to lift 10 pounds.
Requires eye-hand coordination, manual dexterity and a normal range of hearing and vision (with or without correction).
Join our team at Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. and be part of a dynamic and innovative company that is transforming the financial technology landscape. Together, we can shape the future of payments and banking solutions while providing unmatched value to our clients.
