Member of Technical Staff (AI Agent Payments Infrastructure)

A well-funded, roughly ten-person startup building payment infrastructure that lets AI agents spend money safely on behalf of people and businesses is looking for a payments and infrastructure engineer ready for early-stage ownership.

Your focus

• Build checkout and payment flows that carry a purchase from an agent’s request to a confirmed order across browser checkout, payment protocols and direct APIs
• Design the card vault and credential boundaries so agents can transact without ever seeing card details
• Create spend rules, budgets and approval flows, along with the customer tools to configure and audit them
• Build risk systems that catch compromised accounts and bad merchants
• Own reconciliation and the ledger at very high event volume, including messy failure cases like checkout timeouts

Ideal background

• 5+ years as a software engineer in payments, ideally at a top-tier tech company or a chartered bank or trust
• Hands-on experience building a payment processor, not only integrating a third-party payments API
• End-to-end ownership of production backend services, including carrying the pager
• A design style that plans for failure up front: timeouts, retries, idempotency and backpressure
• Comfort using AI tools every day and a real appetite for early-stage startup work

On-site in San Francisco, five days a week; relocation support is not offered. Visa transfers considered.