Staff Software Engineer - waterloo

Job title: Staff Software EngineerReports to: Director, EngineeringDepartment: DevelopmentLocation: Waterloo, Ontario, Canada

About Priority

Priority Technology Holdings, Inc. 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 creative platform that combines payables, acquiring, and banking and treasury solutions. This unified approach allows businesses to streamline financial operations, reduce unnecessary costs, and uncover recent revenue opportunities.

At Priority, 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.

About the Role

Staff Software Engineers operate at the domain level, responsible for shaping system design and improving reliability across multiple teams.

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. Staff Software Engineers operate across a domain, ensuring that systems owned by multiple teams are designed consistently, operate reliably, and scale effectively.

This role focuses on leading the design and evolution of systems across teams, improving system cohesion, and driving consistent engineering practices. You will partner closely with Software Engineers, Software Development Engineers in Test, Engineering Managers, Product Managers, and Product Designers to ensure systems support customer workflows and business outcomes.

Staff Software Engineers influence technical direction across teams, improve system reliability and scalability, and mentor engineers while elevating engineering practices across the domain.

This role is focused on leading the design and delivery of high-impact solutions across three core areas: customer-facing AI innovation, AI-driven risk and fraud, and AI-enabled operational efficiency.

Responsibilities

• Leads the design and evolution of complex systems spanning multiple services, ensuring scalability, reliability, and long-term maintainability across a product domain.
• Defines and drives architectural patterns, service boundaries, and system interactions that enable teams to build and evolve systems consistently.
• Guides technical design across teams, influencing implementation decisions to ensure alignment with architectural standards and domain-level technical direction.
• Evaluates trade-offs across performance, reliability, scalability, and development velocity, helping teams make sound engineering decisions.
• Establishes and improves testing strategies, validation patterns, and quality standards across multiple systems to ensure consistent system behavior and reliability.
• Ensures systems integrate effectively into CI/CD pipelines with strong quality gates, automation, and deployment safety mechanisms.
• Drives reliability and observability practices across systems, ensuring services are instrumented with meaningful metrics, logs, and traces.
• Defines alerting strategies and ensures systems align with SLIs/SLOs, enabling proactive detection and resolution of issues.
• Guides teams in incident response, root cause analysis, and implementation of systemic fixes that reduce recurrence.
• Defines and influences system-level and domain-level KPIs that measure reliability, performance, and customer impact.
• Partners with product managers and product designers to ensure technical solutions align with product goals, customer workflows, and business outcomes.
• Identifies systemic risks, architectural gaps, and scaling challenges across services, driving initiatives to improve system resilience and platform stability.

What Success Looks Like

• Systems across a domain are scalable, reliable, and consistently aligned with architectural standards.
• Technical decisions improve long-term system health, reduce complexity, and enable faster, safer product delivery.
• Multiple teams build and evolve systems using consistent patterns, reducing fragmentation and operational risk.
• Architectural guidance enables teams to move faster while maintaining high standards for quality and reliability.
• Reliability practices (observability, alerting, incident response) are strong and consistently applied across systems.
• Production issues are reduced through proactive design, improved validation strategies, and systemic fixes.
• System and domain-level KPIs are clearly defined, measurable, and used to drive continuous improvement.
• Engineering work is consistently aligned with customer outcomes and business impact.
• Cross-team collaboration is effective, with strong alignment between engineering, product managers, and product designers.

Candidate Requirements

Required

System Design & Architecture

• Proven experience leading the design and evolution of complex systems within a product domain or across multiple services.
• 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, optimizing query performance, and contributing to data architecture decisions.

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.

Technical Leadership & Influence

• Strong ability to influence technical decisions across teams and contribute to domain-level technical direction.
• Demonstrated ability to mentor engineers and elevate engineering practices within a team or domain.
• Ability to identify 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.
• Exposure to designing or integrating AI-enabled features or workflows within products or internal systems.
• 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.
• 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 & Benefits

Compensation range: $128K-$168K 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

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.