Staff Software Engineer, Payments

About Kindsight:

Kindsight builds technology that helps fundraisers make a difference. For decades, Kindsight has supported the education, healthcare, and nonprofit sectors with fundraising tools and the largest charitable giving database on the market. And as the giving sector evolves, so does Kindsight. As the leader in fundraising intelligence, Kindsight leverages real-time data and AI to help thousands of organizations around the world identify, manage, and engage with donors - at any scale. With purpose-built CRMs that corral all of that donor information and campaign tracking into one place, donor prospect research tools that offer proactive insights and real-time donor intel, and generative AI that creates personalized, meaningful content drafts at scale, Kindsight’s product suite is truly changing the game for donor fundraising.

Position Summary:

We are seeking a Staff Software Engineer, Payments to provide technical leadership as Kindsight builds its next-generation Payments Platform.

This is a hands-on Staff IC role on a newly forming Payments Engineering team. You will work closely with the Director of Engineering to shape the architecture, technical direction, and engineering standards for a new Payments service supporting Ascend, AdvRM, and Connect.

You will help determine how Kindsight integrates with its selected payments partner, how the platform should scale, and how we build reliable systems for moving and reconciling real donor funds.

This is not a pure architecture role. We expect the Staff Engineer to remain actively involved in implementation, with roughly 60–70% hands-on coding , particularly during the early stages of the build.

The role is heavily backend-focused. Our backend technology is still being finalized, with Ruby currently under strong consideration. Prior Ruby or Salesforce experience is not required.

What matters most is deep Payments experience, strong system-design ability, sound engineering judgment, and a track record of building or scaling financial infrastructure.

Kindsight’s current Staff profile calls for org-wide technical ownership of Payments and significant influence over the next-generation platform.

What You’ll Do:

• Help define the architecture and technical direction of Kindsight’s next-generation Payments Platform.

• Design and build the new backend Payments service and partner integrations.

• Own system-level decisions around reliability, scalability, reconciliation, transaction processing, and financial correctness.

• Establish technical patterns and engineering standards for the Payments team.

• Lead complex design decisions across multiple products and systems.

• Act as a technical escalation point for difficult Payments incidents and architecture questions.

• Mentor Senior and Intermediate engineers and help raise the technical bar of the team.

• Partner closely with Product and other stakeholders as Kindsight builds out Payments Operations, QA, and supporting functions.

• Remain deeply hands-on in the codebase while influencing the broader technical roadmap.

• Help design for the complex legal, financial, and reporting structures of universities, healthcare foundations, nonprofits, and other Kindsight customers.

What We’re Looking For:

• 8–12+ years of professional software engineering experience , including significant technical leadership in Payments, billing, fintech, or another regulated financial environment.

• Deep hands-on experience building or scaling production Payments infrastructure.

• Strong system-design and architecture skills.

• Experience integrating payment gateways, processors, payment platforms, or orchestration providers.

• Strong understanding of reconciliation, transaction lifecycle, idempotency, retries, recurring payments, and financial correctness.

• Experience owning technical direction across multiple systems, services, or teams.

• Strong backend engineering fundamentals in Ruby, Go, Java, C#, Python, Node.js, or another modern backend language.

• Experience making technical decisions where reliability, security, compliance, or financial risk are significant.

• Ability to operate effectively in a greenfield or early-stage platform environment.

• Strong communication skills and the ability to explain technical tradeoffs to both engineers and non-technical stakeholders.

• A strong bias toward action, paired with thoughtful, well-reasoned engineering judgment.

Nice To Have:

• Experience with embedded Payments, PayFac models, or payment orchestration.

• Experience with Stripe, Adyen, Braintree, Cybersource, Spreedly, TouchNet, Worldpay, or similar platforms.

• Experience with Ruby or Ruby on Rails.

• Experience building a Payments platform from the ground up.

• Experience supporting systems processing hundreds of millions or billions in annual payment volume.

• Experience leading a major Payments migration or platform consolidation.

• Experience working directly with Security, Compliance, or Payments Operations teams.

• Experience with complex merchant, sub-merchant, nonprofit, or institutional payment structures.

• Experience with Salesforce Apex or Lightning Web Components.

Not a Fit If:

• Your Payments experience is limited to checkout or client-side gateway integrations.

• You have not owned meaningful backend Payments infrastructure in production.

• You prefer architecture and strategy work but no longer want to write code.

• You are uncomfortable making and defending system-level technical decisions.

• You need a mature roadmap and fully defined architecture before you can be effective.

• You are not interested in the reliability, compliance, or financial-risk dimensions of Payments engineering.

• You prefer to wait for complete consensus before moving a problem forward.

Strong Signals:

• You have helped build a Payments platform from the ground up.

• You have scaled Payments infrastructure through significant transaction growth.

• You have been the primary technical voice for a major Payments architecture decision.

• You have designed reconciliation and reliability patterns for systems moving real money.

• You have led a major payment-provider integration, migration, or consolidation.

• You have resolved difficult production issues involving duplicate, missing, delayed, or incorrectly routed payments.

• You have mentored engineers through complex system-design and Payments problems.

• You are still actively coding despite operating at Staff or Principal level.

Why Join the Payments Team?

Kindsight is building Payments as a new product line, and this role will have unusually high influence over how that platform takes shape.

You’ll join a small engineering team at the beginning of the build and work directly with the Director of Engineering to help define the technical foundation.

The opportunity includes:

• Greenfield architecture and development.

• Significant technical ownership.

• A small team with high individual impact.

• Direct influence over platform direction and engineering standards.

• The opportunity to build infrastructure that could eventually support billions of dollars in annual payment volume .

• Complex Payments challenges across universities, healthcare foundations, nonprofits, and other institutional customers.

For a Staff Engineer who wants to remain hands-on while helping define an entire Payments platform, this is a rare opportunity to build rather than inherit.

Why Join the Payments Team?

Kindsight is building Payments as a new product line, and this role will have unusually high influence over how that platform takes shape.

You’ll join a small engineering team at the beginning of the build and work directly with the Director of Engineering to help define the technical foundation.

Compensation Range: $160,000 - $180,000 OTE annually, based on experience, market benchmarks and role complexity. We aim to offer fair, competitive pay that reflects your skills and the market.

This advertised position is for an existing vacancy at Kindsight.

At Kindsight, we’re proud to be a place where everyone belongs and has an equal opportunity to contribute, thrive and grow. We hire based on skills, potential, and impact, and we believe our differences fuel innovation. We welcome all individuals and do not discriminate on the basis of gender identity and expression, race, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientation, colour, religion, creed, gender, national origin, age, marital status, pregnancy, sex, citizenship, education, languages spoken or veteran status. We’re building a workplace where everyone has the opportunity to do meaningful work and make a difference.

We leverage artificial intelligence (AI) tools to support certain aspects of our recruitment process. These tools may help with resume screening, drafting job descriptions, creating interview questions and occasionally identifying potential candidates.

All hiring decisions are made by our people, not AI. Our intent is to use AI thoughtfully to streamline administrative tasks, improve the candidate experience and support fair, unbiased hiring practices consistent with industry standards .