Staff Software Engineer - Very Good Security (VGS)

About VGS

VGS is building the trust infrastructure for a new era of commerce. As commerce becomes agentic, payments are increasing dramatically in volume, speed, and complexity, and the companies driving that shift need a foundation they can fully trust.

That's where VGS comes in. We're the world's leader in payment tokenization, trusted by the most innovative AI and Fortune 500 companies, merchants, banks, and fintechs to power modern payments and agentic commerce. We store more than 9 billion tokens and process more than 10 billion monthly interactions, touching a third of all e-commerce. That scale isn't incidental. It's why leading companies embed our universal token vault and credential management platform directly into their stack, taming the complexity of payment data so they can move faster.

About the Role

We’re building payment infrastructure for a world where AI agents don’t just recommend, search, and summarize. They transact.

The Agentic API is creating the secure backend layer that enables trusted agents to initiate purchases, operate within user-approved mandates, retrieve scoped payment credentials, and complete transactions without exposing raw card data.

As a Staff Software Engineer, you’ll help pioneer a new category of payment infrastructure at the intersection of AI, card networks, cryptography, and secure money movement, building clean, reliable APIs for the next generation of commerce.

What You’ll Do

• Architect Agentic Payment Infrastructure: Lead the design and evolution of Python 3.13+ and FastAPI services powering secure, production-critical agentic payment flows.
• Define the Core API Platform: Design APIs and domain models for card enrollment, agentic token provisioning, purchase intents, mandates, device attestation, OTP flows, confirmations, and cryptogram retrieval.
• Own Security, Reliability & Scale: Drive architectural decisions across security, scalability, availability, performance, and developer experience for sensitive payment and cryptographic workflows.
• Build Deep Observability: Establish consistent patterns for error handling, traceability, structured logging, metrics, and distributed tracing using OpenTelemetry and Prometheus.
• Automate Platform Provisioning: Design extensible provisioning workflows using Kubernetes APIs and Custom Resource Definitions.
• Set the Quality Bar: Define rigorous unit, integration, acceptance, and end-to-end testing strategies for high-risk payment flows, including canary-safe production validation.
• Lead Complex Initiatives: Lead technical design reviews, surface architectural and delivery risks early, and drive cross-functional initiatives from initial exploration through reliable production operation.
• Pioneer AI-Native Engineering: Apply AI-assisted development and agentic workflows across the SDLC to accelerate prototyping, testing, refactoring, investigation, and delivery while maintaining a high quality and security bar.
• Partner Across the Ecosystem: Collaborate with Product, Security, Infrastructure, Platform, and external card-network partners to translate evolving requirements into secure, scalable systems.

What You Bring

• Ownership at Scale: 10+ years of experience taking personal ownership of outcomes in complex, large-scale distributed systems within mission-critical environments.
• AWS & Infrastructure-as-Code: Advanced proficiency in AWS ecosystems leveraging Terraform to build reproducible environments.
• Containerization & Orchestration: Strong, hands-on experience with Kubernetes (EKS), Docker, and GitOps workflows (Flux, Argo, GitHub Actions).
• Automation & Scripting: Strong coding skills in Python to automate infrastructure and build operational tools.
• Observability Expertise: Experience implementing Prometheus, Grafana, or OpenTelemetry at scale.
• Security & Networking Foundations: Solid understanding of cloud security, API Gateways, load balancing, and network isolation, viewing security as a fundamental engineering constraint, not an afterthought.

Nice to Have:

• Experience with tokenization, payment processing, or security products
• BA/BS degree
• A knack for out-of-the-box thinking that thrives in a fast-paced startup environment
• Experience designing mandate, credential-provisioning, authentication, attestation, or cryptogram-based workflows
• Experience applying AI developer tools or agentic automation to day-to-day engineering workflows