Staff Software Engineer

Job title: Staff Software Engineer 

Reports to: Director, Engineering - Payables

Department: Payable Solutions

Location: Remote

Grade: 21

About Priority: 

Our vision in Product & Technology is to engineer the world's most resilient, AI-native financial ecosystem that empowers businesses to transcend table-stakes and lead the agentic future, where every financial transaction is intelligent, every developer is accelerated, and every experience is unified.

At Priority, we are building the Priority Commerce Engine, a unified platform that enables businesses to collect money, store money, lend money, move money, and build modern commerce experiences at scale.

About the Role:

Staff Software Engineers are the engineering backbone of their team. You're the engineer everyone wants on the hard problems — the ones that need solid judgment, deep system understanding, and someone who'll actually ship them. You're hands-on every day: you design and implement the parts of the system that are too important or too tricky to leave to anyone else, you debug the production issues everyone else has bounced off, and your code is the model the team's review bar is set against. You lead by example — your quality, your work ethic, and your AI-native practice raise the team's by visible degrees over time. At Staff, "I shape direction but don't really code anymore" doesn't apply.

When the team hits a high-pressure moment — a major incident, a cross-functional escalation, a critical delivery — you're the engineer the team looks to, and you show up regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend. The hours don't matter; the outcome does.

You're also the technical authority for your domain — its architecture, its standards, its debt. Architecture here is a writing job as much as a design job, but it's earned through doing the work, not separated from it.

You know the domain's customers and stakeholders, and the outcomes the domain is committed to. The domain's KPIs are partly yours: not just system metrics like latency and error rate, but the customer-facing and business outcomes the domain exists to deliver.

What You’ll Do:

• Ship the team's hardest work hands-on — design, implement, review, deploy, and operate it through production.

• Set the team's code-quality and design bar by example; your reviews teach, and your design feedback changes outcomes.

• Own your domain's architecture — its structure, integration patterns, and standards — write the ADRs that document the significant decisions, and keep technical debt visible, quantified, and shrinking.

• Own the domain's OKRs and KPIs alongside the team's manager and product partners — system metrics (reliability, latency, cost) and customer-facing outcomes (conversion, time-to-value, satisfaction) — and frame technical investment in terms leadership can act on.

• Help the team improve predictability — scope ambiguity out before commitments, surface delivery risk early, and engineer away structural friction.

• Lead the team's AI-native and agentic engineering practice — by your daily example, not by mandate.

• Own your domain's delivery, reliability, and security; take part in incident response and on-call; bring rigor to postmortems and follow-through to actions.

• Lead during the team's high-pressure moments — major incidents, cross-functional escalations, and critical delivery — regardless of time of day, day of week, or weekend.

• Mentor engineers toward design and architecture ownership; develop the team's bench.

What Success Looks Like:

• The team's hardest problems get shipped well — because you took them on, not because they got escalated.

• The team is more predictable on your watch, and its quality bar holds because you live it — reviews teach, escaped defects trend down, commitments hold.